
COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT 



A YEAR FROM A 



REPORTER'S NOTE-BOOK 



BY 



RICHARD HARDING DAVIS, F.R.G.S. 



AUTHOR OF 



THE PRINCESS ALINE "VAN BIBBER, AND OTHERS' 

" GALI.EGHER, AND OTHER STORIES " 

"SOLDIERS OF FORTUNE" ETC. 



ILLUSTRATED 



TWO COPIES RECEIVED 

5 ° J 





NEW YORK AND LONDON 
HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1898 



.133 



/•£- 3/^: 






Copyright, 1897, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



TO 



CECIL CLARK 



AUTHOR'S NOTE 

The events I have tried to describe in this book occurred 
in different parts of the world between the months of May, 
1896, and June, 1897. 

Of the articles and letters that have been selected to fill it, 
those on the Coronation, the Inauguration, and the Jubilee 
appeared in Harpers Magazine, the one on the Millennial 
Celebration in Hungary in Scribner s Magazine. The letters 
from Cuba were written to the New York Journal while I was 
on the island as a correspondent of that paper, and were later 
published in a book called "Cuba in War-time." Those 
used here were loaned through the courtesy of the publisher, 
Mr. Robert Howard Russell. The article on the Greek- 
Turkish war is made up of one which appeared in Harper s 
Magazine and of letters which I wrote from Turkey and Greece 
while acting as war correspondent of the London Times. 

Richard Harding Davis. 



CONTENTS 



TAGE 

The Coronation 3 

The Millennial Celebration at Budapest 69 
Cuba in War-time : 

i. the death of rodriguez 99 

ii. along the trocha 113 

The Inauguration 137 

With the Greek Soldiers 193 

The Queen's Jubilee 261 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



THE CORONATION PROCESSION FASSING THE GREAT 

BELL Frontispiece 

OUTSIDE MOSCOW Facing p. IO 



THE CZAR IN HIS STATE ENTRY INTO MOSCOW . 

THE CZARINA'S CARRIAGE IN THE STATE PROCES- 
SION 

THE CZAR PLACES THE CROWN ON HIS HEAD . . 

THE CZAR CROWNING THE CZARINA 

THE ENTRANCE TO THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT 

THE PROCESSION AT THE START 

GROUP OF NOBLES IN THE COSTUME OF THE FOUR- 
TEENTH CENTURY 

THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ 

REGULAR CAVALRYMAN — SPANISH 

ONE OF THE BLOCK-HOUSES 

FOR CUBA LIBRE 

A SPANISH SOLDIER 

THE TROCHA 

ONE OF THE FORTS ALONG THE TROCHA . . . 

SPANISH CAVALRY 

THE VICE-PRESIDENT TAKING THE OATH OF 
OFFICE 

IN THE DIPLOMAT'S GALLERY 

RETURNING FROM THE CAPITOL 

REVIEWING THE PROCESSION FROM THE STAND 
IN FRONT OF THE WHITE HOUSE .... 

AN AMERICAN P.ODY-GUARD 

EVZONES LEAVING VONITZA FOR SALAGORA . . 

THE RECEPTION TO GARIBALDI AT CORFU . . 

ix 



24 

32 
58 
GO 
72 
84 

ss 

IOO 
10S 
114 
116 
118 
124 
12S 
132 

133 
140 
156 

180 
188 
208 
210 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

DRAGGING OFF A TURKISH CANNON ABANDONED 

AT SALAGORA Facing p. 2l6 

A PRIEST OF THE GREEK CHURCH IN TURKEY 

SURROUNDED BY GREEK SOLDIERS .... " 2l8 
EVZONES EXECUTING THEIR NATIONAL DANCE, 

NEAR ARTA " 220 

AN AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT (JOHN BASS)^ 

DIRECTING THE FIRE OF THE GREEKS . . . )■ " 2 2d 

VELESTINOS J 

AN ENCAMPMENT OF GREEK SOLDIERS .... " 226 
FIRING FROM THE TRENCHES AT VELESTINOS. . " 230 

THE BATTLE OF VELESTINOS " 234 

THE MOUNTAIN BATTERY AT VELESTINOS ..." 250 
THE STAFF-OFFICERS OF THE INDIAN ARMY . . " 276 
THE QUEEN PASSING THE DEVONSHIRE CLUB IN 

ST. JAMES'S STREET " 284 

THE QUEEN DURING THE THANKSGIVING SERVICE 

AT ST. PAUL'S " 288 

LORD ROBERTS OF KABUL AND KANDAHAR ON HIS 

CELEBRATED PONY " 292 

LT.-COL. THE HON. MAURICE GIFFORD, COMMAND- 
ING THE RHODESIAN HORSE " 298 

MAHARAJAH SIR PETRAP SINGH " 302 



/ 




THE CORONATION PROCESSION PASSING THE GREAT BELL 



THE CORONATION 



THE CORONATION 



WE started for Moscow ten days be- 
fore the date set for the corona- 
tion, leaving Berlin at midnight, and when 
the chief of the wagon - lit woke us at 
seven the next morning we were within 
fifteen minutes of the custom-house. 

It was raining, and outside of the wet 
window-panes miles of dark-green grass 
were drawn over little hills as far as the 
eye could see. No houses, no people, no 
cattle, no living thing of any kind moved 
under the low dark skies or rose from the 
sodden prairie. 

It was a gloomy picture of emptiness 
and desolation, a landscape without char- 
acter or suggestion, and as I surveyed it 
sleepily I had a disappointed feeling of 

3 



THE CORONATION 

being cheated in having come so far to 
find that the Russian steppes were merely 
our Western prairie. But even as this was 
in my mind the scene changed, and lived 
with meaning and significance, for as the 
train rushed on there rose out of the misty 
landscape a tall white pillar painted in 
black stripes. And I knew that it sig- 
nalled to Germany, and to all the rest of 
the world, " So far can you go, and no 
farther," and that we had crossed into 
the domain of the Czar. It must be a 
fine thing to " own your own home," as 
the real - estate advertisements are con- 
stantly urging one to do, and it must give 
a man a sensation of pride to see the sur- 
veyors' stakes at the corners of his town 
site or homestead holding, and to know 
that all that lies within those stakes be- 
longs to him ; but imagine what it must be 
to stake out the half of Europe, planting 
your painted posts from the Arctic Ocean 
to the Pacific, from the borders of Austria 
and Hungary down to the shores of the 

4 



THE CORONATION 

Black Sea, to the Pamirs, in the very face 
of the British outposts, and on to China, 
saying, as it were, " Keep out, please ; this 
belongs to me." 

Trowbridge came with me because he 
was going to the coronation in any event, 
and because he could speak Russian. I 
had heard him speak French, German, 
and Italian when we had first met at Flor- 
ence, and so I asked him to go with me to 
Moscow as an assistant correspondent of 
the New York paper I was to represent. 
He made an admirable associate, and it 
was due to him and his persuasive manner 
when dealing with Russian officials that I 
was permitted eventually to witness the 
coronation. It came out later, however, 
that his Russian was limited to a single 
phrase, which reflected on the ancestors of 
the person to whom it was addressed, and 
as I feared the result of this, I forbade 
his using it, and his Russian, in con- 
sequence, was limited to " how much ?" 
"tea," and "caviare"; so one might say 

5 



THE CORONATION 

that we spoke the language with equal 
fluency. 

We had a sealed letter from the Russian 
ambassador at Washington to the custom- 
house people, and we gave it to a very 
smart -looking officer in a long gray over- 
coat and a flat white cap. He glanced 
over it, and over our heads at the dismal 
landscape, and said, " We expected you last 
night at one o'clock," and left us wonder- 
ing. We differed in opinion as to whether 
he really had known that we were coining, 
or whether he made the same remark to 
every one who crossed the border, in order 
to give him to understand that he and his 
movements were now a matter of observa- 
tion and concern to the Russian govern- 
ment. 

As a matter of fact, the Russian govern- 
ment probably takes the stranger within 
its gates much less seriously than he does 
himself. The visiting stranger likes to be- 
lieve that he is giving no end of trouble to 
a dozen of the secret police ; that, sleeping 

6 



THE CORONATION 

or waking, he is surrounded by spies. It 
adds an element of local color to his visit, 
and makes a good story to tell when he 
goes home. It may be that for reasons of 
their own the Russian police help to en- 
courage him in this belief, but that they 
spy upon every stranger who comes to see 
their show cities seems hardly probable. 
And if the stranger thinks he is being 
watched he will behave himself just as 
well as though he were being watched, 
and the result, so far as the police are con- 
cerned, is the same. 

All the places in the fast trains had been 
engaged for many days before, so that we 
were forced into a very slow one, and as 
the line was being constantly cleared to 
make way for the cars of imperial blue 
that bore princes and archdukes and spe- 
cial ambassadors, we were three days and 
three nights on our way to Moscow. But 
it was an interesting journey in spite of its 
interminable length, and in spite of the 
monotonous landscape through which we 

7 



THE CORONATION 

crawled ; and later, in looking back to it 
and comparing its lazy progress with the 
roar and rush and the suffocating crowds 
of the coronation weeks, it seemed a most 
peaceful and restful experience. 

The land on either side of the track was 
as level as our Western prairie, but broken 
here and there with woods of trembling 
birch and dark fir trees. Scattered vil- 
lages lay at great distances from one an- 
other and almost even with the soil, their 
huts of logs and mud seldom standing 
higher than one story, and with doors so 
low that a tall man could enter them only 
by stooping. 

Between these log houses were roads 
which the snow and rain had changed into 
rivers of mud, and which seemed to lead to 
nowhere, but to disappear from off the face 
of the earth as soon as they had reached 
the last of each group of huts. There were 
no stores nor taverns nor town-halls visible 
from the car windows, such as one sees on 
our Western prairie. Instead there were 



THE CORONATION 

always the same low -roofed huts of logs 
painted brown, the church of two stories 
in the centre, the wide, muddy road strag- 
gling down to the station, the fields where 
men and women ploughed the rich choco- 
late-colored soil, and, overhead, countless 
flocks of crows that swept like black clouds 
across the sky. When the villages ceased 
the marshes began, and from them tall 
heron and bittern rose and sailed heavily 
away, answering the shrill whistle of the 
locomotive with their hoarse, melancholy 
cries. There are probably no two kinds 
of bird so depressing in every way as are 
the heron and the crow, and they seemed 
to typify the whole country between Alex- 
androv and Moscow, where, in spite of the 
sun that shone brilliantly and the bright 
moist green of the grass, there was no sign 
of movement or mirth or pleasure, but, in- 
stead, a hopeless, dreary silence, and the 
marks of an unceasing struggle for the 
bare right to exist. 

The railroad stations were the only 

9 



THE CORONATION 

bright spots on our horizon. They stood 
in bunches of aspen and birch trees, sur- 
rounded by neat white palings, and inside 
there were steaming samovars brilliantly 
burnished, and countless kinds of hors 
(Tceuvres in little dishes on clean linen 
cloths, and innumerable bottles of vodki, 
and caviare in large tin buckets. As we 
never knew when we should arrive at the 
next station, we ate something at each 
one, in order that we might be sure of 
that much at least, and, in consequence, my 
chief recollection of travelling in Russia 
is hot tea, which we scalded ourselves in 
drinking, and cold caviare, and waiters in 
high boots, who answered our inquiries as 
to how long the train stopped by exclaim- 
ing, " Beefsteak," and dashing off delight- 
edly to bring it. 

At every cross - road there were little 
semi-official stations, with the fences and 
gates around them painted with the black 
and white stripes of the government, the 
whole in charge of a woman, who stood in 



IO 




OUTSIDE MOSCOW 



THE CORONATION 

the road with a green flag held out straight 
in front of her. In Russia they feed the 
locomotive engines with wood as well as 
coal, and long before we reached a station 
we would know that we were approaching 
it by the piles of kindling heaped up on 
either side of the tracks for over a mile, 
so that the country had the appearance of 
one vast lumber-yard. 

These piles of wood, and the black and 
white striped fences, and the frequent 
spectacle of a lonely child guarding one 
poor cow or a half- starved horse, with no 
other sign of life within miles of them, 
were the three things which seemed to us 
to be the most conspicuous and character- 
istic features of the eight hundred miles 
that stretch from the German border to 
the ancient capital. 

All that we saw of the moujiks was at 
the stations, where they were gathered in 
silent, apathetic groups to watch the train 
come and go. The men were of a fine 
peasant type, big-boned and strong-look- 



THE CORONATION 

ing, with sad, unenlightened faces. They 
neither laughed nor joked, as loungers 
around the railroad stations are wont to 
do at home, but stood staring, with their 
hands tucked in their sleeves, watching 
the voyagers with a humble, distressed 
look, like that of an uncomprehending 
dumb animal. 

They all wore long, greasy coats of 
sheepskin, cut in closely at the waist and 
spreading out like a frock to below their 
knees ; on their feet the more well-to-do 
wore boots. The legs and feet of the 
others were wrapped closely in long linen 
bandages, and bound with thongs of raw- 
hide or plaited straw. All the men had 
the inevitable flat cap, which seems to be 
the national badge of Russia, and their 
hair was long and clipped off evenly in a 
line with their shoulders. The women 
dressed exactly like the men, with the 
same long sheepskin coats and high boots, 
so that it was only possible to distinguish 
them by the kerchief each wore round her 

12 



\ 



THE CORONATION 

head. They were short and broad in stat- 
ure, and so much smaller than their hus- 
bands and sons that they seemed to belong 
to another race, and none of them either in 
face or figure showed any marked trace of 
feminine grace or beauty. 

Beyond Poland the Hebrew type, there 
prevalent, disappeared, of course, and the 
population seemed to be divided into two 
classes — those that wore a uniform and 
those that wore the sheepskin coat. But 
the greater number wore the uniform. 
There were so many of these, and they 
crowded each other so closely, that all the 
men of the nation seemed to spend their 
time in saluting somebody, and to enjoy 
doing it so much that when no one passed 
for some time whom they could reasonably 
salute, they saluted some one of equal rank 
to themselves. It seemed to be the na- 
tional attitude. 

"In this country," a man told us, "it is 
well to remember that every one is either 
master or slave. And he is likely to take 

13 



THE CORONATION 

whichever position you first assign to him." 
Stated baldly, that sounds absurd, but in 
practice we found that it held good to a 
certain degree. If the stranger approach- 
es the Russian official — and everybody is 
some sort of an official — politely and hat 
in hand, the Russian at once assumes an 
air of authority over him ; but if he takes 
the initiative, and treats the official as a 
public servant, he accepts that position, and 
serves him so far as his authority extends. 
Moscow proved to be a city of enormous 
extent, spread out widely over many low 
hills, with houses of two stories and streets 
of huge round cobble-stones. The houses 
are of stucco, topped with tin roofs painted 
green; and the bare public squares and lack 
of municipal buildings and of statues in 
public places give Moscow the undeco- 
rated, uncared-for look of Constantinople, 
or of any other half-barbaric capital where 
the city seems not to have been built with 
design, but to have grown up of itself and 
to have spread as it pleased. 

14 



THE CORONATION 

The Kremlin, of which so much was 
written at the time of the coronation, is 
no part of the city proper. It is in it, but 
not of it. It is a thing alone, unlike the 
rest of Moscow ; nor, indeed, is it like any 
other city in the world. Its great jagged 
walls encompass churches, arsenals, pal- 
aces, and convents of an architecture bor- 
rowed from India and Asia and the Eu- 
rope of the Middle Ages ; it is as though 
the Tower of London, the Houses of Par- 
liament, Westminster Abbey, St. Paul's, 
and the Knightsbridge Barracks were all 
huddled together on the Thames Embank- 
ment and shut in with monster walls, leav- 
ing the rest of London an unpicturesque 
waste of shops of stucco, and of churches 
with gilded domes instead of spires, sepa- 
rated by narrow and roughly hewn high- 
ways. If a high wall were built around 
the lower part of New York City, and 
across it at Rector Street, forming a tri- 
angle to the Battery, the extent of the 
ground it would cover would about equal 



THE CORONATION 

that shut in by the ramparts of the Krem- 
lin. 

At the time of the coronation the ar- 
teries of the great sprawling city that lies 
about this fortress were choked with hun- 
dreds of thousands of strange people. 
These people were never at rest; they ap- 
parently never slept nor relaxed, but turn- 
ed night into day and day into night, and 
formed a seething, bubbling mixture of 
human beings, the like of which perhaps 
never before has been brought together in 
one place. 

There were hundreds of thousands of 
Russian peasants who slept in the streets ; 
there were tens of thousands of Russian 
soldiers who slept under canvas in the 
surrounding plains ; there were princes 
in gold and plate-glass carriages of state ; 
Russian generals seated behind black 
horses, driven three abreast, that never 
went at a slower pace than a gallop, so 
that the common people fell over one an- 
other to get out of danger; there were 

16 



THE CORONATION 

ambassadors and governors of provinces, 
and all their wonderfully costumed suites ; 
bare-kneed Highlanders and bare- kneed 
Servians ; Mongolians in wrappers of fur 
and green brocade, with monster muffs for 
hats ; proud little Japanese soldiers in 
smart French uniforms ; Germans with 
spiked helmets ; English diplomats in top 
hats and frock-coats, as though they were 
in Piccadilly ; Italian officers with five- 
pointed stars on their collars and green 
cocks' feathers in their patent-leather som- 
breros ; Hungarian nobles in fur-trimmed 
satins ; maharajahs from the Punjab and 
southern India in tall turbans of silk ; and 
masters of ceremonies and dignitaries of 
the Russian court in golden uniforms and 
with ostrich feathers in their cocked hats. 
And all of these millions of people were 
crowding each other, pushing and hurry- 
ing and worrying, each breathing more 
than his share of air and taking up more 
than his share of earth, and each of them 
feverish, excited, overworked and underfed, 



THE CORONATION 

and thinking only of himself and of his 
own duties — whether his duty was to leave 
cards at some prince's door, or to risk his 
life in hanging a row of lamps to a minaret 
in the skies ; whether it was to meet an ar- 
riving archduke at the railroad station, or 
to beg his ambassador for places for him- 
self and his wife on a grandstand. 

Imagine a city with its every street as 
densely crowded as was the Midway Plai- 
sance at the Chicago Fair, and with as dif- 
ferent races of people, and then add to that 
a Presidential convention, with its brass 
bands, banners, and delegates, and send 
into that at a gallop not one Princess 
Eulalie — who succeeded in upsetting the 
entire United States during the short time 
she was in it — but several hundred Prin- 
cesses Eulalie and crown -princesses and 
kings and governors and aides-de-camp, 
all of whom together fail to make any im- 
pression whatsoever on the city of Mos- 
cow, and then march seventy thousand 
soldiers, fully armed, into that mob, and 

iS 



THE CORONATION 

light it with a million colored lamps, and 
place it under strict martial law, and you 
have an idea of what Moscow was like at 
the time of the coronation. 

There were probably some one or two 
of that great crush who enjoyed the coro- 
nation ceremonies, but they enjoyed them 
best, as every one else does now, in per- 
spective ; at the time there was too much 
to do and too little time in which to do 
it — even though the sun did rise at mid- 
night in order to °ive us a few more hours 
of day — for any one to breathe regularly or 
to feel at peace. 

The moujik who repaired the streets 
may possibly, in his ignorance, have en- 
vied the visiting prince as he dashed over 
the stones which the moujik had just laid 
down with his bare hands ; but the prince 
had probably been standing several hours 
in a padded uniform, with nothing to eat 
and nothing to smoke, and was going back 
to his embassy to jump into another pad- 
ded uniform and to stand for a few hours 

19 



THE CORONATION 

longer, until, as he drove back again and 
saw the moujik stretched for the night on 
his pile of cobble - stones, he probably en- 
vied him and said, " Look at that lazy dog 
sleeping peacefully, while I must put on 
my fourth uniform to-day, and stand up in 
tight boots at a presentation of felicitations 
and at a court ball at which no one is al- 
lowed to dance." In those days you could 
call no man happy unless you knew the 
price he paid for his happiness. 

A large number of the people in Mos- 
cow at that time might have been divided 
into two classes : those who were there of- 
ficially, and who had every minute of their 
stay written out for them, and who longed 
for a moment's rest ; and those who were 
there unofficially, and who worried them- 
selves and every one over them in trying 
to see the same functions and ceremonies 
from which the officials were as sincerely 
anxious to be excused. As a rule, when 
the visitor first arrived in Moscow he 

found enough of interest in the place it- 

20 



THE CORONATION 

self to content him, and did not concern 
himself immediately with the ceremonies 
or court balls; he considered, rightly- 
enough, that the decorations in the streets 
and the congress of strange people from 
all parts of the world which he saw about 
him formed a spectacle which in itself re- 
paid him for his journey. He found the 
city hung with thousands of flags and ban- 
ners ; with Venetian masts planted at the 
street corners and in the open squares ; 
with rows of flags on ropes, hiding the sky 
as completely as do the clothes that swing 
on lines from the back windows of New 
York tenements. The streets were tun- 
nels of colored bunting by day and valleys 
of colored lights by night ; false facades of 
electric bulbs had been built before the 
palaces, theatres, and the more important 
houses, and colored glass bowls in the 
forms of gigantic stars and crowns and 
crosses, or in letters that spelled the 
names of the young Czar and Czarina, 
were reared high in the air, so that they 

21 



THE CORONATION 

burned against the darkness like pieces of 
stationary fireworks. 

There were miles and miles of these 
necklaces of lamps, and people in strange 
costumes and uniforms moved between 
them, with their faces now illuminated, as 
though by the sun's rays, by great wheels 
of revolving electric- light bulbs, and now 
dyed red or blue or green, as though they 
were figures in a ballet on the stage. 

But the visitor who was quite satisfied 
with this free out-of-door illumination at 
night, or with wandering around, Baede- 
ker in hand, by day, soon learned that 
there were other sights to see behind 
doors which were not free, and access to 
which could not be bought with roubles, 
and he at once joined the vast army of the 
discontented. Sometimes he wanted one 
thing, and again another ; it might be that 
he aspired only to a seat on a tribune from 
which to watch the parade pass, or it might 
be that he longed for an invitation to the 
ball at the French Embassy ; but, what- 

22 



THE CORONATION 

ever it was, he made life a torment to him- 
self and to his official representative un- 
til he obtained it. The story of the strug- 
gles of the visitors to the coronation to be 
present at this or that ceremony would 
fill many pages in itself ; and it might, if 
truthfully set down, make humorous read- 
ing now. But it was a desperate business 
then, and heart-burnings and envy and all 
uncharitableness ruled when Mrs. A. was 
invited to a state dinner and Mrs. B. was 
not, or when an aide-de-camp obtained a 
higher place on the tribune than did any 
of his brother officers. 

There was what was called a court list, 
or the distinguished strangers' list, and 
that was the root of all the evil ; for when 
the visitor succeeded in getting his name 
on that list his struggles were at an end, 
and he saw at least half of all there was to 
see, and received large engraved cards from 
the Emperor, and his soul was at peace. 

And it may be considered a tribute to 
the personal regard in which our minister 



THE CORONATION 



is held in St. Petersburg that he was able 
to place more of his countrymen on that 
list than were the ambassadors of any 
other country. It might be urged that 
several of these etrangers de distinction 
from the United States had never been 
heard of at home until they got their 
names upon that list, but that is the more 
reason why they should feel grateful to a 
minister who had sufficient influence with 
the Russian court to do well by those who 
had never done very well by themselves. 

Much was written, previous to the for- 
mal entrance of the Czar into Moscow, of 
the precautions which were being taken to 
guard against any attack upon his person, 
and this feature of the procession was dwelt 
upon so continually that it assumed an im- 
portance which it did not deserve. Mos- 
cow is the holy city of Russia, and the 
Czar, as the head of the Orthodox Church, 
was, as a matter of fact, in greater safety 
while there than he might have been in 
any other part of his empire. The people 

24 




THE CZAR IX HIS STATE ENTRY IXTO MOSCOW 



THE CORONATION 

of Moscow are, outwardly at least, most 
fervently religious ; the daily routine of 
their lives is filled with devotional exer- 
cises, and the symbols of their Church 
hang in each room of each house, and are 
not only before their eyes, but in their 
minds as well. For no devout Russian 
enters even a shop without showing def- 
erence to the shrine which is sure to be 
fastened in some one of its four corners, 
and in the streets he is confronted at ev- 
ery fifty yards of his progress by other 
shrines and altars set in the walls and by 
churches, so that in his walks abroad he 
is so constantly engaged in the exercise 
of crossing himself or of removing his cap 
that it is more accurate to say of him that 
his prayers are occasionally interrupted 
than that he frequently stops to pray. 
You will see a porter who is staggering 
under a heavy burden stop and put it 
down upon the pavement and repeat his 
prayers before he picks it up again, and 
he will do this three or four times in the 



THE CORONATION 



course of half an hour's walk ; troops of 
cavalry come to a halt and remove their 
hats and pray while passing a church ; and 
when the bells ring, even the policeman 
standing in the middle of the street, splat- 
tered by mud and threatened by galloping 
droschkas, crosses himself and repeats his 
prayers bareheaded, while you try vainly 
to imagine a policeman on Broadway tak- 
ing off his helmet and doing the same 
thins:. In the restaurants there is a like 
show of devotion on the part of the wait- 
ers, who stand beside your table mutter- 
ing a prayer to themselves, while you al- 
low your food to grow cold rather than 
interrupt them. 

This illustrates the reverential feeling of 
the people who welcomed the Czar, whom 
they regard as the living representative 
of the Church on earth; so, naturally, his 
chief protection came not from his detec- 
tives, but from this feeling for him in the 
hearts of his subjects. 

But in a gathering of four hundred thou- 



26 



THE CORONATION 

sand people, anywhere in the world, there 
is likely to be a madman or two. President 
Carnot and President Faure, who could not 
be called autocratic rulers, found that this 
was so, and it was against the possibility 
of this chance madman, and not through 
any distrust of the mass of the Russian 
people, that precautions were taken. 

Almost every function connected with 
the Czar's coronation was described on the 
official programme as "solennel"; even the 
banquets were solemn, and the entrance of 
the Czar and his progress from outside the 
gates to the Kremlin within was more than 
solemn ; it was magnificent, imposing, and 
beautiful, and in its historical value and in 
its pomp and stateliness without compari- 
son. Those who expected to see the splen- 
dor of a half-barbaric court found a pageant 
in which no detail was in bad taste, and 
those who came prepared to exclaim at all 
they saw sat hushed in wonder. It was 
as solemn a spectacle as the annual prog- 
ress of the Pope through the Church of 

27 



THE CORONATION 

St. Peter, as beautiful as a picture of fairy- 
land, and as significant in its suggestion 
of hidden power as a moving line of battle- 
ships. For an hour and a half the proces- 
sion passed like a panorama of majesty 
and wealth and beauty, and as silently as 
a dream, while all about it the air was 
broken by the booming of cannon as 
though the city were besieged, and the 
clashing of bells, and the curious moan- 
ing cheer of the Russian people. In this 
procession were the representatives of 
what had once been eighteen separate 
governments, each of which now bowed 
in allegiance to the Russian Emperor. 
They appeared in their national costumes 
and with their own choice of arms, and 
they represented among them a hundred 
millions of people, and each of them bore 
himself as though his chief pride was that 
he owed allegiance to a young man twenty- 
eight years old, a young man who never 
would be seen by his countrymen in the 
distant provinces from which he came, to 

2S 



THE CORONATION 



whom the Czar was but a name and a sym- 
bol, but a symbol to which they prayed, 
and for which they were prepared to give 
up their lives. 

Among these people, whose place was 
in the van of the procession, were the tall 
Cossacks in long scarlet tunics, their 
breasts glittering with silver cartridge- 
cases, and their heads surmounted with 
huge turbans of black Astrakhan ; dwarf- 
ish soldiers from Finland, short and squat 
like Esquimaux; yellow-faced Tartars in 
furs, and Mongolians in silver robes ; wild- 
eyed, long-haired horsemen from Toorkis- 
tan and the Pamirs, with spear points as 
long as a sword blade ; and the gentlemen 
of the Chevaliers Gardes and of the Garde 
a Cheval, in coats of ivory-white with sil- 
ver breastplates, and helmets of gold on 
which perched the double eagle of Russia 
in burnished silver. 

Behind these came many open carnages 
of gold, lined with scarlet velvet, in which 
sat the ministers of the court, holding their 

29 



THE CORONATION 

wands of office, and after them servants of 
the Emperor's household on foot in gold- 
laced coats and white silk stockings and 
white wigs ; masters of horse rode beside 
them, with coats all of gold, both back and 
front, and with sleeves and collars of gold; 
and behind them the most picturesque 
feature of the whole pageant, the bronzed, 
fiercely bearded huntsmen of the Emperor, 
the men who throttle the wolves with their 
bare hands until the dogs rush in and pull 
them down, dressed in high boots and 
green coats, and armed with long glitter- 
ing knives ; following them were gigantic 
negroes in baggy trousers and scarlet jack- 
ets — a relic of the clays of Catherine — 
whose duty it is to guard with their lives 
the entrance to the royal bedchamber; and 
after them footmen dressed as you see them 
in the old prints, with ostrich plumes and 
tall wands — descendants of the time when 
a footman ran on foot before his master's 
carriage and did not ride comfortably on 

the box-seat. 

30 



THE CORONATION 

After these, beneath the fluttering flags 
and between the double row of fifty thou- 
sand glittering bayonets, and under as 
bright a sun as ever shone, came a re- 
splendent group of mounted men in uni- 
forms that differed in everything save 
magnificence, and in the fact that over 
the breast of each was drawn the blue 
sash of the Order of St. Andrew. These 
riders were the grand-dukes of Russia, the 
visiting heirs-apparent and princes, and the 
dukes and archdukes from England, Ger- 
many, Italy, Greece, and Austria — from all 
over the world, from the boy Prince of 
Montenegro to the boy Prince of Siam. 

They rode without apparent order, al- 
though their places were as fixed' as the 
stars in their orbits, and they formed the 
most remarkable mounted escort that this 
century has seen ; and in front of them, 
riding quite alone, and dressed more sim- 
ply than any one in the procession, came 
the young Czar, turning his face slightly 
from side to side, and with his white- 



THE CORONATION 

gloved hand touching his Astrakhan cap. 
The house-tops rocked and the sidewalks 
seemed to surge and sway with waving 
caps and upraised hands, and the groan- 
ing, awe -struck cheer rose to one great 
general acclamation which drowned the 
bells and the booming cannon. 

But it rose still higher when, following 
the Czar's escort of princes, came the 
Dowager Empress. It was she who was 
more loudly greeted than either the Em- 
peror or the Czarina, for the people have 
loved her longer, and she has made them 
worship her through many acts of clem- 
ency and kindness, and perhaps far more 
than all else through her devotion to her 
husband during his six months' illness, 
when she sat clay and night at his bedside. 

Behind the Dowager Empress came the 
state carriage of the Czarina. It was drawn 
by eight snow-white horses in trappings of 
broad red morocco leather, covered with 
heavy gold mountings. The harness had 
been made in Paris, and the gold had been 



THE CORONATION 

engraved in the Rue de la Paix. Each 
horse, that would have preferred a mouth- 
ful of oats, ground his teeth on a gold bit as 
big around as a man's thumb, and as deli- 
cately chased and engraved as a monogram 
on a watch, and wore ostrich feathers on 
his head, and ten thousand dollars' worth 
of harness on his back. The ten different 
sets of harness used in the procession cost 
the Russian government one million dol- 
lars. Each horse that drew the Czarina's 
chariot had an attendant in a cap of ostrich 
feathers and a coat of gold, who led him by 
a silken rein, and two giants, seven feet 
high, strode beside the wheels, and two lit- 
tle pages sat with their backs to the driver 
on his gold throne, and regarded the Czar- 
ina through a screen of glass as the young 
Empress smiled and bowed to her adopted 
people through the windows of her Cinder- 
ella chariot. Great artists had decorated 
the panels of this carriage, and master- 
workmen had carved its gold sides and 
wheels and axles ; plumes of white and 

c 33 



THE CORONATION 

black and orange ostrich feathers nodded 
and swayed from its top of scarlet velvet, 
and the sfold-embroidered cushions inside 
gave it the appearance of a sumptuous 
jewel-box fashioned to hold this most beau- 
tiful princess in her gown of silver, with 
her ermine cloak fallen back from her 
bare shoulders, and with diamonds hang- 
ing from her neck to her knees, and with 
diamonds high upon her head. 

In the train of the Czarina were grand- 
duchesses and maids of honor in still more 
fairy carriages ; and then, when it seemed 
impossible to add another touch of splen- 
dor to that which had already passed, the 
nature of the procession, as though by a 
piece of clever stage-management, sudden- 
ly changed, and in magnificent contrast to 
the grace and wealth and feminine beauty 
which had gone before came three miles 
of armed and mounted men, the picked 
horsemen of Russia, crowding so closely to- 
gether that one saw nothing of the street 
over which they passed, but only an un- 

34 



THE CORONATION 

broken mass of tossing manes and flash- 
ing breastplates and fluttering pennants, 
and one heard only the ceaseless tramp of 
horses' hoofs and the clank of steel. 

The crowning and chrismation of the 
Czar of Russia was to the rest of the 
world a beautiful spectacle, but to the Rus- 
sian it was an affair of the most tremen- 
dous religious significance. How serious 
this point of view was is shown in an ex- 
tract from the official explanation of the 
coronation, the authorized guide to the 
service, which was printed in four lan- 
guages and furnished to those who wit- 
nessed the ceremony. It is interesting to 
note that in the paragraph quoted here 
the capital letters are about equally di- 
vided between the ruling family and the 
Deity : 

"The Royal power in Russia, from the time that 
she was formed into an empire, forms the heart of 
the nation. All Russia prays for the Tsar, as for 
her father ; from Him descends grace & benevo- 

35 



THE CORONATION 

lence upon His subjects, in Him all good finds sup- 
port & protection, & evil merited punishment. In 
the instance of the Autocrat of Russia we see that 
the Tsars reign by the Lord. God Almighty has 
often manifested His affection for the Russian peo- 
ple on their Tsar. The affection of the Lord rests 
on the Ruling House & the right hand of the Al- 
mighty guards, removes & saves It from all mis- 
fortunes & evils." 

This is the spirit in which the corona- 
tion is regarded by the orthodox Russian ; 
and the desire simply to be near the ca- 
thedral where this ceremony was taking 
place was what brought hundreds of thou- 
sands of Russians of all classes to Moscow 
and to the walls' of the Kremlin, so that 
when the sun rose resplendent on the day 
of the coronation, the high banks of that 
fortress, the streets around it, the bridges 
and open squares, and the shores of the 
river which cuts Moscow in two, were 
black with the people who had spent the 
night in the open air, who followed the 
coronation from point to point of the ser- 
vice by the aid of the bells and the cannon, 

36 



THE CORONATION 

and who fell upon their knees or lifted 
their voices in prayer in unison with those 
within the walls of the Church of the As- 
sumption. 

The story of how these latter were ad- 
mitted to the Church of the Assumption 
would be extremely interesting reading if 
the masters of ceremonies would choose 
to tell it. The matter cost these dignita- 
ries many sleepless nights, and where it 
made them one friend it made them a 
dozen enemies. It was an extremely dif- 
ficult task, for on account of the lack of 
space in the cathedral it was quite impos- 
sible to give room there to many who 
would have been entitled to a place in it 
if their official importance and not their 
physical size had been the deciding-point ; 
but as it was, the question became not 
whom " the Ceremonies " could please by 
admitting, but whom they could least of- 
fend by keeping out. In order to satisfy 
these latter, tribunes were arranged around 
the cathedral, and those who sat on cer- 

37 



THE CORONATION 

tain tribunes were supposed to be offi- 
cially present at the coronation. This 
may explain what is meant by several 
well-known people when they say they 
saw the coronation of the Czar ; officially 
speaking, they were present, but in much 
the same sense that the ruler of England 
is supposed to be present on the bridge of 
every English man-of-war, so that an of- 
ficer always salutes when he mounts the 
companionway of that structure ; but, as 
a matter of fact, these latter only saw the 
procession as the Czar and the Czarina 
entered and left the cathedral, and that 
in itself was worth travelling four thou- 
sand miles to see. 

Those who saw the actual ceremony 
were members of the imperial family and 
the most important of the Russian no- 
bles, the visiting princes, the heads of resi- 
dent and special embassies and legations, 
and, in a few instances, their first secre- 
taries, the aides - de - camp of the foreign 

princes, and a few correspondents and 

38 



THE CORONATION 

artists. An ambassador who happened 
to be unmarried was a man among men 
to " the Ceremonies," and a prince who 
did not insist on having the commander- 
in-chief of his army standing at his side 
filled their eyes with tears of joy. It was 
their duty to decide between an aide-de- 
camp from Bulgaria and a Russian am- 
bassador at home on leave, a Japanese 
prince and an English general, a German 
duchess and the correspondent of the 
Paris Figaro. It was a matter of so 
many square inches chiefly, and one man 
or woman who got in kept a dozen appli- 
cants for the space out; and the pressure 
that was brought to bear in order to gain 
a footing — and a footing was actually all 
one obtained — threatened the peace of Eu- 
rope, and caused tears of disappointment 
and wounds that will rankle in the breasts 
of noble Russian families for years to 
come. 

Personally I knew nothing of the strug- 
gles of any save the correspondents, and 

39 



THE CORONATION 

they were sufficient in themselves to hold 
my undivided attention for ten days and 
ten nights. There were three hundred 
correspondents, speaking eleven different 
languages, and each advanced his indi- 
vidual claims and the claims of the peri- 
odical he represented with a pertinacity 
and vigor worthy of a great cause. It is 
a small thing now, but at the time life did 
not seem worth living unless vou were to 
be admitted to the cathedral, and then 
even it did not mean so much to get in 
as it did to have come that distance and 
to be kept out. A great political party 
backed the men who represented the of- 
ficial organ of that party; banking houses, 
cabinet ministers, ladies of high degree, 
ambassadors, and princes brought finan- 
cial, social, and political influence into the 
fight, and lobbied, bribed, and cajoled for 
their favorites with a skill and show of 
feeling that reminded one of the struggles 
among the delegates at a Presidential con- 
vention in Chicago ; while the Russian 

40 



THE CORONATION 

officials, bewildered, dazed, and driven to 
distraction, maintained throughout an ab- 
solute silence as to who might be the fort- 
unate ones, and by so doing kept the 
struggles raging round their heads until 
the very eve of the coronation. They 
even refused hope to one man, an English 
artist named Forrestier, who came with 
a letter of introduction from Queen Vic- 
toria to the Grand-Duchess Sergius, which 
fact had naturally a somewhat depress- 
ing effect upon those who had no queens 
to push them forward ; and even men 
like Sir Donald McKenzie Wallace, who 
represented the Times, and Sir Edwin 
Arnold, the correspondent of the Daily 
Telegraph, did not know that their call- 
ing and election was by any means sure. 

In the end " the Ceremonies " turned 
away such men as Frederick Villiers, who 
had been present at the last coronation, 
and who was one of the four correspond- 
ents who had followed the Russian army 
from the beginning of the Russian-Turk- 

41 



THE CORONATION 

ish war to the fall of Plevna; so that 
those who got in cannot feel that they 
did so on the principle of the selection 
of the fittest. It was represented in my 
behalf that anything that was written 
in a magazine would be more easy of 
access in the future, and would have a 
more lasting quality than that which ap- 
peared in the more ephemeral columns of 
a daily paper; so I was admitted because 
I represented a magazine, and in spite 
of the fact, and not on account of the 
fact, that I was also cabling to a New 
York paper. But without the help of the 
American minister, and the members of 
the visiting and resident American lega- 
tions — and Trowbridge — I could not have 
got in. The members of our legations 
who were present in the chapel were six: 
they were the American minister, Mr. Clif- 
ton R.Breckinridge, and Mrs. Breckinridge, 
General Alexander McD. McCook and 
Mrs. McCook, Admiral Selfridge, and Mrs. 
Peirce, the wife of the secretary of legation, 

42 






THE CORONATION 

who was admitted even though her hus- 
band for some unknown reason was not. 
The New York Herald was represented, 
but by two Englishmen, Aubrey Stanhope 
and Sir Edwin Arnold ; the American 
Associated Press by another Englishman, 
named Watson; the United Press of 
America by Louis Moore, an American ; 
and Harper s Magazine and the New York 
Journal by myself. 

These six officials and Louis Moore, 
who represented seventeen hundred pa- 
pers, and the writer were the only Ameri- 
cans in the cathedral — eight in all. 

Admittance to the cathedral and to the 
Kremlin itself was hedged about with 
much formality, and to one who did not 
speak or read Russian the attempt was 
something of an ordeal, and attended with 
a nervous fear of being turned back at the 
last moment and when within sight of the 
goal. I was required to show a ticket, 
which my driver wore in his hat, before 
I could pass the police lines in the streets ; 

43 



THE CORONATION 

another ticket was necessary to enter the 
gates of the Kremlin ; there was a card of 
invitation to the palace after the corona- 
tion, and one more for the cathedral, and 
with it a badge in the shape of a gold 
crown and a bow of the blue ribbon of 
the order of St. Andrew. Besides these, 
I had to carry a photograph, stamped 
and sealed for identification by the po- 
lice, and a blue and white enamelled star, 
which showed that I was an accredited 
correspondent. 

The word " cathedral " has misled many 
people in regard to the size of the church 
in which the coronation took place, as 
have also the photographs of its exterior. 
The Church of the Assumption is really 
more of a chapel than a cathedral, and 
is cut in two by a great gold screen, so 
that those who witnessed the ceremony 
were crowded into a space only one-half 
as large as that suggested by those pict- 
ures which show the building from the 
outside. This space is about as large as 

44 



THE CORONATION 

the stage of a New York theatre. It is 
hemmed in by three walls and the high 
gold screen which separates the altar and 
the sacred tombs and the holy relics from 
the rest of the cathedral. These walls are 
overlaid from the floor to the dome above 
with gold-leaf, upon which are frescos of 
the saints in dark blues and reds and 
greens, each saint wearing around his 
head a halo of gold studded with precious 
stones. The screen is a wall in itself ; the 
gold upon it alone weighs five tons, and 
the figures of holy men in fresco and 
mosaic with which it is decorated are cov- 
ered with rows of pearls and hung with 
emeralds, rubies, and diamonds. In the 
centre of this hall of precious stones and 
pure gold are four great pillars, the low- 
er half of which were wrapped about for 
the coronation in heavy folds of purple 
velvet. On a platform stretched between 
these pillars, under a canopy of" velvet 
stamped with the double eagle of Russia 
and bearing tufts of ostrich feathers of 

45 



THE CORONATION 

orange, black, and white, were the three 
thrones. The Czar's throne was in the 
centre, on the left of it the Czarina's, and 
that of the Dowager Empress was at the 
right. His was of silver inlaid with great 
blue turquoises ; the Czarina's of ivory, 
carved with scenes of the chase ; that of 
the Dowager Empress was of silver studded 
with all manner of precious stones, includ- 
ing eight hundred and eighty diamonds. 

The light that illuminated the chapel 
came through long stained-glass windows, 
and from twinkling lamps fastened by 
chains to the dusky dome above, and as 
the sun entered the place its long rays of 
colored light pierced the smoke of the 
incense and regilded the walls, passing 
from one jewelled saint to the next, so 
that the dull stones gleamed and shone, 
and the jewels on the lamps, as they 
turned and twisted, coruscated and flashed 
in the dim heights above like the hidden 
treasures in the cave of Monte Cristo. 

It is difficult to know what to tell of 

4 6 



THE CORONATION 

the ceremony of the coronation — what to 
leave unsaid and what to say. The story 
might be written by twenty different men, 
each writing in much greater detail than 
is allowed in the space of this single arti- 
cle, and yet all would not be told ; nor 
misfht anv two tell of the same tiling. It 
would depend upon the point of view. 
The story might be told as it appealed 
to the sad-eyed priest in his long, un- 
kempt hair and beard, and robe of gold 
— the devout Muscovite to whom the dig- 
nitaries present were but as actors on a 
stage, in comparison with the sacred char- 
acter of the chapel itself and with the holy 
relics it contained. That one emerald 
alone in the great gold wall was worth a 
king's ransom would mean nothing to one 
who believed that St. Paul with his own 
hands had painted the picture beneath it, 
and that a part of the robe of our Saviour 
and a nail of the true cross lay hidden 
under the same dome which sheltered 
these women with bare shoulders, and 

47 



THE CORONATION 

these princes of a day in their tinsel and 
diamond stars. Or why should he con- 
sider the deeds of these famous generals 
when one of the holy pictures in his 
keeping had turned back Tamerlane and 
his whole army? Could the grizzled old 
warrior Gourko, or the big kindly eyed 
English general Grenfell, the hero of the 
Soudan, or the little dark-skinned Yama- 
gata, have done more ? 

Or the story might be told by one of 
the ambassadors in the front row of the 
tribune, who would see in the ceremony 
and in the display and publicity given it 
a new departure for Russia, a bid, as it 
were, for the attention of the world. To 
him the people themselves would be the 
essential feature. He would see a half- 
confessed alliance in the position assigned 
a brother ambassador, or read a promise 
of marriage in the triumphant smile of 
one of the visiting princes. His story 
would have been one full of diplomatic 

secrets, which is only another word for 

4 8 



THE CORONATION 

the gossip of diplomats ; and he would 
have been delighted to explain why the 
representative of the United States, in- 
stead of ranking with the ambassadors of 
other powers nearly as great as his own, 
stood below the minister from a little 
kingdom as small as Rhode Island, and 
not half so important, except for a lurid 
past; and why the Austrian ambassador, 
the representative of an emperor, and a 
prince in his own right, had been given 
the Grand Cross of St. Andrew, as though 
he were a ruling monarch, on the evening 
of one day, and had been asked to give it 
back before breakfast on the following 
morning. He would have told you that 
the reason the English bishop, with his 
mitre and crook, sat in a higher place 
than the papal nuncio was because the 
Greek Church was coquetting with the 
Church of England, and that the English 
ambassador, being a Roman Catholic, had 
chosen not to recognize the peer of the 
English Church or to present him to the 

D 49 



THE CORONATION 

Czar, and that the Czar was indignant ac- 
cordingly; but how much more serious 
than this was the silly act of his confrere, 
the French ambassador, who had nearly 
undone what his country was striving to 
bring about, by refusing to kiss the Cza- 
rina's hand, because, forsooth ! the poor 
little soul held that act of homage to be 
unbecoming in a representative of a free 
republic. As though discourtesy had ever 
been a sign of independence, or as though 
kissing the hand of a woman could bring 
anything but honor to any man, even to 
a Frenchman whose republicanism has not 
become so serious that it has made him 
forego his title. 

There were enough stories, besides, to 
fill many books — stories of the men pres- 
ent who had been busy for the last quar- 
ter of a century in making the history of 
the world; stories full of romance and 
intrigue ; stories of love and of battle. 
There was the sailor prince who had 

saved the Czar's life from the sword of 

50 



THE CORONATION 

an assassin ; the Russian prince who is to 
build a railroad from Paris to Pekin, and 
who learned how it could be done as a 
mechanic in the machine-shops of Al- 
toona; there was the Bulgarian prince, 
with hooked nose and with jewels to his 
nails, who changed his child's religion to 
pay for a ticket of admission to this cere- 
mony. 

Or the story of one stone alone among 
the thousands flashing in the light would 
read like a romance if it were told in de- 
tail — how it gleamed once in the dark 
shades of a Hindoo temple in the brow 
of a god, how a private soldier with a 
bayonet in his profane hands dug it out 
and carried it for months in his knapsack, 
how it lay tossed by the waves in the sea- 
chest of a sailor, who sold it to a Jew 
dealer in Hatton Garden, who passed it 
on, until its last owner exchanged it for 
a title and five million francs and a yearly 
pension of two thousand roubles. And 
so it rests at last at the end of the Czar's 

51 



THE CORONATION 

sceptre, and on account of its great estate 
one must now back away from it, when 
he is allowed to look at the regalia, as he 
would from royalty itself, or as the Hin- 
doos bowed before it long ago when the 
Orloff diamond was the eye of the great 
god Siva. 

The coronation as a picture was much 
more beautiful than any one could pos- 
sibly have imagined it was going to be, 
and the scene would have been even more 
impressive if the people had not been so 
closely crowded together that the colors 
of the uniforms and court dresses with 
their ornaments and decorations were lost 
in the press of numbers. As it was, ex- 
cept in the case of a very tall man or 
a particularly lofty tiara, you saw only 
those who stood in the front rows, and the 
epaulets or coronets of the many behind 
them. They were so close together, in- 
deed, that when the moment came when 
all should have knelt and the Emperor 

alone should have remained standing, 

52 



THE CORONATION 

there was not room for the men to kneel, 
and many of them were forced to merely 
bend forward, supporting themselves on 
the shoulders of those already kneeling. 

The tribune to the right of the thrones 
was the one most closely crowded. It 
held the grand-duchesses and the ladies 
of the court, who were in the native cos- 
tume of the country, and who wore the 
diamonds for which that country is cele- 
brated. On the tribune immediately be- 
hind the throne stood the Russian sena- 
tors in magnificent coats of gold, with 
boots to the hip and white leather breeches, 
and with ostrich feathers in their peaked 
hats ; with them were the correspondents, 
the Germans and Russians in military 
uniforms, the Englishmen in their own 
court dress, and the Frenchmen and 
Americans in evening dress, which at 
that hour of the morning made them look 
as though they had been up all night. 
The diplomats and their wives, and the 
visiting commanders-in-chief and gen- 

53 



THE CORONATION 



erals of armies from all over the world, 
occupied the third tribune to the left of 
the throne, and formed the most splen- 
did and gorgeous group of all. Around 
the platform itself were the princes and 
grand -dukes glittering with the chains 
and crosses of the imperial orders, and 
between the screen and the platform the 
priests moved to and fro in jewelled mi- 
tres as large as a diver's helmet, and in 
robes stiff with gold and precious stones, 
their vestments flashing like the scales of 
goldfish. For five hours the sun shone 
dimly through the stained glass and bold- 
ly through the high open doors on this 
mass of color and mixture of jewels, so 
that the eye grew wearied as it flashed 
from sword hilts and epaulets or passed 
lightly from shining silks and satins to 
touch tiaras and coronets, falling for one 
instant upon the white hair of some red 
and grizzled warrior, or caressing the shoul- 
ders and face of some beautiful girl. 

But nothing in the whole drama of the 



54 



THE CORONATION 

morning presented so impressive a picture 
as did the young Empress when she first 
entered the chapel and stood before her 
throne. Of all the women there she was 
the most simply robed, and of all the wom- 
en there she was by far the most beauti- 
ful. A single string of pearls was her only 
ornament, and her hair, which was worn 
like that of a Russian peasant girl, fell 
in two long plaits over her bare shoul- 
ders — bare even of a strap, of a bow, of a 
jewel — and her robe of white and silver 
was as simple as that of a child going 
to her first communion. As she stepped 
upon the dais the color in her cheeks was 
high, and her eyes were filled with that 
shyness or melancholy which her pictures 
have made familiar ; and in contrast with 
the tiaras and plumes and necklaces of the 
ladies of the court surrounding her, she 
looked more like Iphigenia going to the 
sacrifice than the queen of the most pow- 
erful empire in the world waiting to be 
crowned. 

55 



THE CORONATION 

The most interesting part of the cere- 
mony, perhaps, was when the Czar changed 
from a bareheaded young officer in a colo- 
nel's uniform, with his trousers stuck in 
his boots, to an emperor in the most mag- 
nificent robes an emperor could assume, 
and when the Czarina followed him, and 
from the peasant girl became a queen, with 
the majesty of a queen, and with the per- 
sonal beauty which the queens of our 
day seem to have lost. When the mo- 
ment had arrived for this transformation 
to take place, the Czars uncle, the Grand- 
Duke Vladimir, and his younger brother 
Alexander lifted the collars of the different 
orders from the Czar's shoulders, but in 
doing this the Grand-Duke Vladimir let 
one of the stars fall, which seemed to hold 
a superstitious interest for both of them. 
They then fastened upon his shoulders 
the imperial mantle of gold cloth, which is 
some fifteen feet in length, with a cape of 
ermine, and covered with the double eagle 

of Russia in black enamel and precious 

56 



THE CORONATION 

stones. Over this they placed the broad 
diamond Collar of St. Andrew, which sank 
into the bed of snowy white fur, and lay 
glimmering and flashing as the Emperor 
moved forward to take the imperial dia- 
dem from the hands of the Metropolitan 
of St. Petersburg. 

The crown was a marvellous thing, fash- 
ioned in two halves to typify the eastern 
and western kingdoms, formed entirely 
of white diamonds, and surmounted by a 
great glowing ruby, above which was a 
diamond cross. The Czar lifted this flash- 
ing globe of flame and light high above 
him, and then lowered it to his head, and 
took the sceptre in his right hand and the 
globe in the left. 

When the Czar seated himself upon the 
throne, the Czarina turned and raised her 
eyes questioningly ; and then, in answer 
to some sign he made her, she stood up 
and walked to a place in front of him, 
and sank down upon her knees at his 
feet, with her bare hands clasped before 

57 



THE CORONATION 

her. He rested his crown for an instant 
on her brow, and then replacing it upon 
his own head, lowered a smaller crown 
of diamonds upon hers. Three ladies-in- 
waiting fastened it to her hair with long 
gold hair-pins, the Czar watching them as 
they did so with the deepest interest; and 
then, as they retired, two of the grand-dukes 
placed a mantle similar to the Czar's upon 
her shoulders, and hung another diamond 
collar upon the ermine of her cape, and 
she stepped back to her throne of ivory 
and he to his throne of turquoise. The 
supreme moment had come and gone, 
and Nicholas II. and Alexandra Feodo- 
rovna sat crowned before the nations of 
the world. 

Some one made a signal through the 
open door, and the diplomats on the 
tribunes outside rose to their feet and 
the crush of moujiks below them sank 
on their knees, and the regiments of 
young peasant soldiers flung their guns 

at salute, and the bells of the churches 

58 




THE CZAR PLACES 1 HE CROWN ON HIS HEAD 



THE CORONATION 

carried the news over the heads of the 
kneeling thousands across the walls of 
the Kremlin to where one hundred and 
one cannon hurled it on across the river 
and up to the highest hill of Moscow, 
where the modern messengers of good 
and evil began to tick it out to Odessa, 
to Constantinople, to Berlin, to Paris, to 
the rocky coast of Penzance, where it 
slipped into the sea and hurried on un- 
der the ocean to the illuminated glass face 
in the Cable Company's tall building on 
Broadway, until the world had been cir- 
cled, and the answering congratulations 
came pouring into Moscow while the 
young Emperor still stood under the 
dome of the little chapel. 

The most interesting part of the cere- 
mony that followed was the presentation 
of felicitations by the visiting princes and 
princesses. It was interesting because the 
usual position of things was reversed, and 
the royalties who watch with smiles the 
courtesies and bows of the humbly born 

59 



THE CORONATION 

who come to their levees and presentations 
were now forced to bow and courtesy, and 
the lowly born were the smiling, critical 
spectators. 

And it was satisfactory to find that the 
royalties were quite as awkward over it and 
as embarrassed as was ever any young de- 
butante at a Buckingham Palace Drawing 
Room. What they had to do was simple 
enough. They had each to cross the plat- 
form, to kiss the Czar on the cheek and the 
Czarina on the hand alone, and if it were 
a woman who was presenting her congratu- 
lations, to turn her cheek to the Czarina to 
kiss in return. The same ceremony was 
required for the Dowager Empress as for 
the Czarina. It does not sound difficult, 
but not more than six out of a hundred did 
what they had been told to do, and each of 
them hurried through with it as quickly as 
possible, and with an expression of counte- 
nance that betokened anything rather than 
smiling congratulations. For from their 

point of view all their little world was look- 

60 




THE CZAR CKoWM.NG THE CZARINA 



THE CORONATION 

ing on at them, all their princely cousins 
and kingly nephews and royal uncles and 
aunts were standing by to see, and for the 
brief moment in which each passed across 
the platform and most unwillingly held the 
centre of the stage, he felt that the whole 
of Europe was considering his appearance, 
and criticising his bow, and counting the 
number of times he kissed or was kissed in 
return. The Duke of Connaught, being 
the Czarina's uncle, was the only man who 
kissed her ; and the Prince of Naples, the 
heir to the throne of Italy, did not even 
kiss the Czar, but gave each of them a hand 
timidly, and then backed away as though 
he were afraid they would kiss him in 
spite of himself. Some of the royalties, 
in their embarrassment, assumed a most 
severe and disapproving air, as did the 
Queen of Greece, a very handsome woman 
in fur, who, in contrast to the simpers of 
the others and in order to show how self- 
possessed she was, scowled at the young 
couple like Lady Macbeth in the sleep- 

6 1 



THE CORONATION 

walking scene. Others looked as though 
they were saying good -night to their 
hostess, and assuring her that they had 
had a very pleasant evening ; but a few 
were deeply moved, and kissed the Czar's 
diamond collar as a sign of fealty, and 
some of the Russian nobles bowed very 
low, and then kissed the Czarina's bare 
shoulder. 

After the congratulations the ceremony 
was continued by the priests alone, who 
chanted and prayed for nearly two hours, 
during which time the Czar and Czarina 
took but little part in the service beyond 
crossing themselves at certain intervals. 
The strain became very great ; it was im- 
possible to keep one's attention fixed on 
the strange music of the choir or on the 
unfamiliar chanting of the priests, and 
people began to whisper to one another, 
until at the end of the ceremony almost 
every one was whispering as though he 
were at an afternoon tea. 

It was not that there was any disrespect 

62 



THE CORONATION 

felt, but that it had become physically im- 
possible, after six hours of silence and of 
remaining wedged in an upright position 
in one place, to maintain an attentive atti- 
tude of either mind or body. 

But the priests ceased at last, and the 
most solemn ceremony of the chrismation 
was reached, and the Czar passed from 
sight through the jewelled door of the 
screen, while his young wife, who could 
not enter with him, waited, praying for him 
beside the picture of the Virgin. When 
he came forth again the tears were stream- 
ing down his cheeks and beard, and he 
bent and kissed the Empress like a man 
in a dream, as though during the brief 
space in which he had stood in the holy 
of holies he had been face to face with the 
mysteries of another world. 

That was the end of the ceremony of 
the coronation, and let us hope it will be a 
long time before there will be another one. 

In looking back at it now, it seems to 
me that what made it most impressive 

63 



THE CORONATION 

was the youth of the Czar and Czarina. 
There was something in the sweet girlish- 
ness of her manner, and of the dauntless- 
ness of the boy in his, that gave them 
both an inexpressible hold upon your in- 
terest and your sympathy. It was not as 
though they had been looking forward to 
this hour for many years, until it had lost 
its first meaning and was now the payment 
for a long period of apprenticeship, until 
it had been lived so often in anticipation 
that when it came it was only a form. It 
was not as though he had grown cynical 
and stout, and she gray-haired and hard- 
ened to it all ; but, instead, she looked like 
a bride upon her wedding-day, and you 
could see in his face, white and drawn with 
hours of prayer and fasting, and in the 
tears that wet his cheeks, how strongly he 
was moved, and you could imagine what 
he felt when he looked forward into the 
many years to come and again saw himself 
as he was at that moment, a boy of twenty- 
eigdit, taking in his hands the insignia of 

64 



THE CORONATION 



absolute sovereignty over the bodies of one 
hundred million people, and on his lips the 
most sacred oaths to protect the welfare of 
one hundred million souls. 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT 
BUDAPEST 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT 
BUDAPEST 



THERE were two great state ceremo- 
nials in two great countries last year; 
one was advertised in every tongue that 
speaks through a printing-press, and the 
fame of it was carried by word of mouth 
from the Persian Gulf to the mountains 
of Tibet, from Pekin to Melbourne, and 
drew four hundred thousand strangers to 
the city of Moscow. The other was not 
advertised at all, and the number of fortu- 
nate foreigners who found it out, and who 
journeyed to Budapest to witness it, could 
almost have been counted on the fingers 
of two hands. The Coronation at Mos- 
cow was very much more than a state 

ceremonial ; it was planned and carried 

69 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

out with the purpose of impressing other 
states. It marked a new departure in the 
self-sufficient, solitary attitude of the Rus- 
sian Empire, and apart from all the sol- 
emn significance it held for the Russian 
people, it was distinctly a play at the royal 
boxes of Europe and the grandstands of 
the world. 

The millennial celebration at Budapest, 
where the nobles of all the counties of 
Hungary met to swear allegiance to the 
King and his crown, differed from it as 
greatly in comparison as does a quiet fam- 
ily wedding, between two people who love 
each other dearly, differ from a royal alli- 
ance brought about for political reasons, 
and the importance of which is exagger- 
ated as greatly as possible. 

This gathering of the clans in Hungary 
for the Banderium, as the ceremony was 
called, was probably suggested by the suc- 
cess of the Exposition at Budapest and by 
the completion of the Houses of Parlia- 
ment in that city. The nobles wished to 

70 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

take advantage of the presence in that 
double capital of the many Hungarians 
who had been brought there by the Expo- 
sition, and to signalize the initiation of the 
Houses of Parliament by some extraor- 
dinary event ; so this ceremony which cel- 
ebrated the one thousandth year of the 
existence of Hungary as a kingdom was 
suggested, and later was carried through 
in a manner which made it one of the his- 
torical spectacles of the century. 

Budapest, as everybody knows, is formed 
of two cities, separated by the Danube, and 
joined together like New York and Brook- 
lyn by great bridges. Buda is a city hun- 
dreds of years old, and rises on a great 
hill covered with yellow houses with red- 
tiled roofs, and surmounted by fortresses 
and ancient German - looking castles, and 
the palace of the King, with terraces of 
marble and green gardens running down 
to meet the river. It still is a picturesque, 
fortified city of the Middle Ages. 

Pesth, just across the way, is the most 

71 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

modern city in Europe ; more modern than 
Paris, better paved, and better lighted ; 
with better facilities for rapid transit than 
New York, and with Houses of Parliament 
as massive and impressive as those on the 
banks of the Thames, and not unlike them 
in appearance. Pesth is the Yankee city 
of the Old World, just as the Hungarians 
are called the Americans of Europe. It 
has grown in forty years, and it has sacri- 
ficed neither beauty of space nor line in 
growing. It has magnificent public gar- 
dens, as well as a complete fire department; 
it has the best club in the world, the Park 
Club ; and it has found time to put electric 
tramways underground, and to rear monu- 
ments to poets, orators, and patriots above- 
ground. People in Berlin and Vienna tell 
you that some day all of these things will 
disappear and go to pieces, that Pesth is 
enjoying a " boom," and that the boom will 
pass and leave only the buildings and elec- 
tric plants and the car -tracks, with no 

money in the treasury to make the wheels 

72 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

go round. This may or may not be true, 
but let us hope it is only the envy and un- 
charitableness of the Austrian and Ger- 
man mind that sees nothing in progress 
but disaster, and makes advancement spell 
ruin. People who live in a city where one 
is asked to show a passport, a certificate of 
good health, a police permit, and a resi- 
dence-card in order to be allowed to mount 
a bicycle, as I was asked to do in Berlin, 
can hardly be expected to look with favor 
on their restless, ambitious young neigh- 
bors of the Balkans. 

All of this, however, has little to do with 
the Banderium, except that it is interest- 
ing to find a people as poetic and pict- 
uresque, and as easily moved as are the 
Hungarians, showing an active concern in 
municipal government, in the latest in- 
ventions in hotel-elevators and smokeless 
powder ; and to find men who are pushing 
Hungary ahead of all the other " old-es- 
tablished " monarchies of Europe, and who 
are delighting in electric tramways and 

73 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

horseless carriages, dressing themselves in 
the chain - armor of their ancestors, and 
weeping over a battered gold crown. 

The descendants of the men who fought 
for what is now Hungary, and what was a 
thousand years ago many separate states 
and provinces and principalities, were the 
men who formed the Banderium last June, 
and who swore allegiance to the crown 
which Pope Sylvester VII. gave to Prince 
Ithen nine centuries before they were 
born. 

It was in their eyes a very solemn cere- 
mony, much too solemn for them to ad- 
vertise it to the world, as they had adver- 
tised their Exposition. In consequence, few 
people saw the spectacle, and it has passed 
away almost unchronicled, which is most 
unfortunate, as all of those who took part 
in the wonderful pageant will have been 
dust for some nine hundred years before 
there will be another. 

The Hungarian nobles who were to ride 
in the procession, the dignitaries of the 

74 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

Austrian Court, the Diplomatic Corps from 
Vienna, all poured into Pesth on the 7th 
of June. 

At that time the city was beautifully 
dressed in honor of their coming. Arches 
and banners shaded the streets, and grand- 
stands, covered with red cloth and orna- 
mented with fluttering flags, lined the route 
of the procession from the new Houses of 
Parliament, across the bridges, up the green 
hill-sides of Buda to the Emperor's palace, 
where the nobles were to pass in review 
before marching back to Pesth. The Ex- 
position had already filled the town with 
Hungarians and Austrians, and every hotel 
was overcrowded, and every cafe chantant 
overflowed upon the pavements, and the 
music of the Tziganes rose and fell at each 
street-corner. Peasant men in snow-white 
petticoats and high boots and broad som- 
breros, with silver buttons on their coats 
and waistcoats, and peasant women in vel- 
vet bodices and gayly colored kerchiefs, 
filled the Exposition grounds and paraded 

75 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

the streets in groups of twenty or thirty 
from each village; soldiers in skin-tight 
breeches, and gypsies and mountaineers, 
tanned to a dark -red brown, with short 
china pipes hanging from their lips, swag- 
gered past in national costumes that have 
not changed in so much as the matter of a 
red sash, or a silver jacket, or an embroid- 
ered cap, from what they were a hundred 
years a^o. 

The visiting strangers made their head- 
quarters at the unique club of which I have 
already spoken ; at least, they met there 
every evening, and those who were dining 
out at some official banquet hurried there 
as soon as they were free. It was a most 
remarkable club and a most remarkable 
gathering. The club itself is the hobby 
of two Hungarian gentlemen, and they 
have bestowed as much thought and money 
upon it as they have given to their own 
homes. Englishmen, Frenchmen, and cos- 
mopolitans, from all over the world, who 

have seen the Union and the new Metro- 

76 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

politan Clubs in New York, the Jockey 
and the Union in Paris, and any half-dozen 
clubs in London, will tell you that in no 
great city is there such a club as this one, 
which is virtually unknown, and lies hidden 
away in the outskirts of a park at Pesth. 
It stands on the edge of the woods, and 
those who had come to the Banderium 
dined each night on its broad balconies 
and lawns, under the open sky, in the light 
of the wavering candles, which showed the 
faces and bright dresses and the jewels of 
the women and the uniforms of the men 
against the dark-green background of the 
forest about them. 

Munkacsy,the Hungarian painter, Count 
Teleki, the explorer, tanned with the fierc- 
est of African suns, and Kossuth, a de- 
scendant of the great Kossuth, were among 
the men who sat every evening in groups 
around the fairy-lamps. With them were 
the sons and grandsons of Andrassy, Ap- 
ponyi, Szechenyi, names that are as highly 
honored in Hungary as are those of our 

77 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

first three Presidents with us ; and there 
was a stray English duke, with three at- 
tendant peers, who had received a hint of 
the ceremony that was to take place at 
Buda, and who had posted in hot haste 
across the Channel to see eleven hundred 
noble horses ridden by eleven hundred 
Hungarian nobles. There was the Prince 
Liechtenstein, just returned from the Coro- 
nation, with new honors heavy upon him, 
and Sir Edmund Monson, the English 
Ambassador to Vienna, upon whom the 
honors were to fall a month later, and there 
were lesser diplomats and grizzled old gen- 
erals in white tunics, and boy officers in 
light blue, and swells in tweed suits and 
nobodies in evening dress. It was a most 
informal and charming collection of people, 
and they all seemed to know one another 
intimately, and acted accordingly. 

Inside the club there was a great ball- 
room, in the style of the Second Empire, 
and reading-rooms and libraries with walls 

of red -morocco books, and vast banquet- 

7 8 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

ing-halls, and rooms for whist and silence, 
or for the more noisy games of roulette 
and the petits chevaux. It was a' succes- 
sion of lessons in good taste, even while it 
made you gasp at the money it must have 
cost somebody — certainly not the club 
members, for they are too few, and the 
club is too inaccessible for them to spend 
much of their time or money there. It ap- 
pears to be just what it is, the hobby of 
two rich men, who have robbed the bric-a- 
brac shops of Europe to make it beautiful, 
and who have searched every club to get 
the best ash-tray, the best hand-bell, the 
best cook, and the best musician. 

They did not have to leave Budapest to 
find the musician. His name is Berkes, 
and no one who has not been to Budapest 
or to Vienna has ever heard him, for the 
Hungarians say naively that were he to 
leave them and play elsewhere they would 
never be able to get him back again, as 
those who heard him once would keep 
him with them forever. He is the king 

79 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

of the gypsy musicians and the master of 
their melody. His violin seems to be just 
as much a part of him as are his arms or 
his eyes or his heart. When he plays, his 
body seems to stop at the neck, and he 
appears to draw all of his strength and 
feeling from the violin in his hands, the 
rest of him being merely a support for his 
head and his instrument. He has curious 
eyes, like those of a Scotch collie — sad, 
and melancholy, and pleading — and when 
he plays they grow glazed and drunken- 
looking, like those of an absinthe drinker, 
and tears roll from them to the point of 
his short beard and wet the wood of his 
violin. His music probably affects differ- 
ent people according to their nerves, but 
it is as moving as any great passage in 
any noble book, or in any great play, 
and while it lasts he holds people abso- 
lutely in a spell, so that when the music 
ceases women burst into tears, and I 
have seen men jump to their feet and 
empty the contents of their pockets into 

So 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

his lap; and they are so sure to do this 
that their servants take their money away 
from them when they are dressing to dine 
at some house where Bcrkes is announced 
to play. One night a Frenchman dipped 
a two-thousand-franc note into a glass of 
champagne and pasted it on the back of 
the man's violin, and the next day Berkes 
sent it back to him again, saying that to 
have this compliment paid him by a for- 
eigner in the presence of his countrymen 
was worth more to him than the money. 

The Hungarian music is typical of the 
people, who are full of feeling and moved 
by sudden gusts of passion. To a nation 
of a calmer and more phlegmatic nature, 
the ceremony of the Banderium could not 
have meant so much, nor would they have 
taken it so seriously ; but to the Hunga- 
rians, who cherish the independence of 
their kingdom, and who never speak of 
Francis Joseph as the Emperor, but as the 
King of Hungary, this swearing allegiance 
to the crown was a ceremony heavy with 

' 81 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

meaning, and surrounded by the most sa- 
cred traditions of the life of the nation and 
of their own families. 

It was interesting in consequence to see 
the same blase young men who the night 
before at the Park Club had discussed the 
only way to break the bank at Monte 
Carlo, dressed the next morning in the 
clothes that their ancestors had worn, or 
in others like them, carrying the same ban- 
ners under which their great-grandfathers 
had fought, weeping with emotion around 
a battered gold crown studded with old 
stones, and cheering their King, who, not 
many years before, had sentenced some of 
the very nobles before him to death. 

You cannot imagine Americans or Eng- 
lishmen doing the same thing ; in the first 
place, they have no national costume, should 
they wish to put one on; and, in the second 
place, their fear of ridicule or their sense of 
humor, which is sometimes the same thing, 
would keep them from wearing it if they 

had. But there was nothing ridiculous in 

82 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

what these Hungarians did. They were 
too much in earnest and they were too sin- 
cere. Later, when I met some of them in 
London in varnished boots and frock-coats, 
I wondered if they could possibly be the 
same men I had seen prancing around on 
horses covered with harnesses of silver and 
turquoise, and themselves dressed in bro- 
cades and in silk tights, with fur-trimmed 
coats and velvet tunics. But at the time 
it seemed a most appropriate costume, for 
one knew they were merely carrying out 
the traditions of their family, and that they 
did not wear these particular clothes be- 
cause they were beautiful or becoming, but 
because they were the costume, not only 
of their country but of their race, and as 
much a part of their family history as an 
Englishman's coat of arms, and because 
once, long before, one of their name had 
fought in a similar costume and stained its 
brocade with blood. 

The day of the ceremony was as beau- 
tiful as blue skies and a warm, brilliant sun 

S3 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

could help to make it, and a soft summer 
breeze shook out the flags and banners, 
and stirred the leaves upon the great hill 
on which Buda stands, and ruffled the sur- 
face of the Danube so that it flashed like 
a thousand heliographs. In the streets 
were hurrying groups of gayly dressed 
peasants, fine stalwart men and simple, 
kindly faced women, and pretty girls of a 
dark, gypsy type, with black eyes, and red 
lips with that peculiar curve which leaves 
the white teeth bare. Soldiers of the Em- 
pire stood at ease along the quaint streets 
of clean, round cobble-stones and yellow- 
faced houses, each marking the holiday 
with an oak leaf in his cap or helmet. 
There was no crowding or pushing, but 
everywhere excellent good - humor and 
good feeling, and from time to time bursts 
of patriotic pride as a state carriage, or 
some body of horsemen, passed to take a 
place in the procession. 

The King's palace stands on the top of 
the hill of Buda, and the tribunes for the 

84 










-ft-"**- 1 











THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

diplomats and the cabinet face the court- 
yard of the palace, making the fourth side 
of the square in which the riders were 
to pass in review before the Emperor. It 
was more like a private garden-party than 
a national celebration, for every one in the 
tribunes seemed to know every one in the 
streets below, and the spectators moved 
about, and talked and criticised, and named 
each new arrival as he or she drove up to 
the doors of the great gray palace oppo- 
site. The sun beat down with a little too 
much vigor, but it showed every uniform 
at its best, and it flashed on the jewels and 
on the sword-blades of the attendant caval- 
ry, and filled the air with color and light. 

Then the Emperor stepped out upon the 
balcony of the palace and saluted, and the 
people arose and remained standing until 
one of the archduchesses, a little girl in 
pink, and the Empress, in deep black, had 
taken their places beside him, and the 
members of the Court, the women in the 
national costume of Hungary and the men 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

in military uniforms, had grouped them- 
selves back of these three figures, and had 
crowded the windows so that the old palace 
bloomed like the wall of an Oxford college 
when the window -gardens are gorgeous 
with color, and stand out from the gray 
stone like orchids on the limb of a dead 
tree. In the procession that followed there 
were eleven hundred mounted men in silks, 
in armor, in furs, and in cloth of gold, and 
many state carriages gilded and enamelled, 
and decorated with coats of arms and vel- 
vet trappings. 

It would have been too theatrical and 
fantastic had it not been that it was an 
historical pageant, and correct in every 
detail, and that the fairy princes were real 
princes, the jewels real jewels, and the fur 
the same fur that a few months before had 
covered a wolf or a bear in the mountains 
of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had 
been hunted by these same men who now 
wore their skins. For an hour the nobles 
passed in dazzling, glittering groups, each 

86 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

rivalling the next, and all making one long 
line of color that wound along the shady 
streets, in and out upon the hill-side, and 
down across the great ridge like a many- 
colored scarf of silk and gold. Each group 
was preceded by its banner, and each 
standard-bearer was accompanied by her- 
alds on foot, and by attendant squires on 
horseback, dressed in the colors of the 
province or burgh or municipality from 
which they came. 

There was no regular uniform, and the 
costumes varied from the days of the Iron 
Age to those of Maria Theresa, who had 
o'iven some of the same uniforms w r e saw 
that clay to the forefathers of the men who 
wore them. But in the dresses of the later 
centuries there was a certain uniformity, 
and although the materials and colors dif- 
fered greatly, the fashion was the same. 
There was a long shirt of silk or satin, silk 
tights embroidered with gold or silver, high 
boots of colored leather, and a sleeveless 
cloak of brocade or velvet, trimmed with 

S7 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

fur. The cap was of velvet surrounded 
with fur, with an aigrette in front orna- 
mented with diamonds. The greater num- 
ber of the horses were magnificent black 
stallions, with as distinguished pedigrees as 
those of the men who rode them, and their 
trappings were as rich as those worn by 
their masters. The average cost of each 
rider's uniform, and of the harness for his 
horse, was five thousand dollars ; some sin- 
gle costumes, on account of the jewels, 
were worth many times that sum. The 
state contributed nothing to this spectacle ; 
each rider paid for his carriage and for the 
equipment of his horses and attendants. 

Of course there were many features of 
the procession which stirred the hearts 
and memories of the native spectators, but 
which were lost on the stranger — certain 
devices on the banners, certain uniforms 
that recalled a great victory, or some pe- 
culiarity of decoration or weapon that none 
but the descendants of a certain family, or 
the inhabitants of a particular village, were 



"S^-, 



n 5fi. 




THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

allowed to bear. But the spectacle as a 
spectacle could be appreciated by any one, 
whether he knew the history of Hungary 
or not. Those Englishmen present who 
had seen the Queen's Jubilee procession 
in 1887 said that the Banderium was much 
finer, and those who had witnessed the 
entry of the Czar into Moscow found it, 
if not so impressive, at least as beautiful. 
The Czar's entry was a modern military 
pageant, the Banderium was a moving 
panorama, an illustration of the history of 
Hungary by some of the very men them- 
selves who had helped to make it, or by 
their sons and grandsons. 

There were so many different combina- 
tions of color that it is impossible to select 
any one as being much more beautiful than 
the others. In one notable group the men 
wore canary yellow silk from head to foot, 
trimmed heavily with silver. Their boots 
were yellow, their capes were yellow, and 
the tall plumes in their peaked caps were 

yellow ; another group wore gray velvet 

s 9 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

with gray fur and silver ; another, purple 
velvet with gold ; another, blue velvet with 
ermine and silver. There were never more 
than twenty men at the most in any group; 
sometimes there would be but five or six, 
but the costume of each one was as rich, 
whether he rode or walked, as any court 
dress of any emperor of Europe. The 
horses were covered with velvet saddle- 
cloths, heavy with jewels and gold and 
silver ornaments. Some were hung from 
the head to the tail with strings of gold 
coins that one could hear jangling for a 
hundred yards as they advanced stamping 
and tossing their heads, and others were 
covered with leopard and tiger skins, or 
with a harness of red morocco leather, or 
with blue turquoises that lay in beautiful 
contrast upon the snow-white coat and 
mane. Some of the provinces which dated 
back to the beginning of civilization were 
represented by men with the arms of the 
days of the Goths and Vandals, and the 

fierce simplicity of their appearance made 

90 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

the silks and satins of those next in line 
seem foolish and theatrical. These de- 
scendants of the earliest warriors were 
perhaps the most effective figures in the 
procession. Some of them wore black 
armor, some gold, some silver, and others 
the plain steel shirt of chain-armor, which 
clung to them like a woollen jersey. Their 
legs were bound with raw leather thongs, 
and on their heads they wore steel casques, 
with a bar of steel running from the helmet 
to the chin to protect the face from sword- 
thrusts, and each rider held before him a 
great spear, from each side of which sprout- 
ed black eagle's feathers. There was some- 
thing so grim and fierce in their appear- 
ance that the crowd along the sidewalks 
stood awed as they passed and then burst 
into the most enthusiastic cheers that were 
heard that day. 

From the palace the procession counter- 
marched to the Houses of Parliament, and 
in its central chamber the heads of each 
deputation gathered around the crown and 

91 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

swore allegiance to it. But it was signifi- 
cant that they swore this allegiance when 
the crown was resting on a cushion in their 
new Houses of Constitutional Liberty and 
not in a palace on the head of a king. That 
ceremony came later when they returned 
again to the palace in Buda, and the Em- 
peror addressed them, and they interrupted 
his speech from the throne with cheer after 
cheer. Some of these men present were 
those whom early in his reign the Emperor 
had sentenced to death, but whose fealty 
and admiration he had won later by his 
own personality and tact and goodness of 
heart. It was a curious spectacle — these 
white-haired noblemen, tall, proud, and 
fierce-eyed, looking in their velvet and furs 
and golden chains like living portraits of 
the old masters, waving their jewelled caps 
at the little unkingly Emperor in his col- 
onel's uniform, padded and tightly laced, 
and with smug side-whiskers, like an Eng- 
lish inspector of police. There was the 
contrast in it of the chivalry and dash and 

Q2 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

poetry of the Middle Ages, with the consti- 
tutional law-abiding monarchy of modern 
times. 

And one wondered as to what will follow 
when Francis Joseph passes away ! 

Will they cheer an archduke as they 
cheered him, with the tears rolling down 
their cheeks ? 

One asks, " What has an Austrian arch- 
duke done for Hungary, for Austria, or 
for himself even ? Does any one in the 
United States know the names of these 
archdukes or archduchesses ? Has he ever 
heard of them or read of them ?" Of course 
he has never seen them, because they con- 
stitute "the most exclusive Court in Eu- 
rope." That has always been their boast, 
as it will be their epitaph. They are the 
most exclusive Court in Europe, so exclu- 
sive that they have not tried to learn the 
language of the twin monarchy of Hun- 
gary, nor sought by any deed or act to win 
the regard or respect of the sixteen millions 
of people over whom some day they hope 

93 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

to reign. They are like a colony of people 
who hide themselves from the rest of the 
world in a deep wood and say to each other, 
" Look how exclusive we are ! There is no 
one in this wood but ourselves " ; and who, 
by repeating "their own names daily and 
talking of no one but themselves, have 
learned to think that they are the people 
of greatest consequence in the world, when, 
as a matter of fact, the world outside of the 
wood is going about its business in the sun- 
shine, working and scheming and pushing 
ahead, forgetting that the most exclusive 
Court of Europe exists. We know a little 
of the princes of other countries, and even 
of the pretenders, for they do something. 
They explore Africa or Tibet ; they open 
hospitals or race yachts or win a Derby ; 
they are at least picturesque and orna- 
mental, and it is pleasant to see them ride 
by in fine clothes and with mounted es- 
corts. 

I once heard an American tourist say to 
a British workman outside of St. James's 

94 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

Palace on a Levee day: "And I suppose 
you pay taxes to support this?" The 
workman said : " Yes, it costs me about six- 
pence a year. Isn't it worth the money ?" 
And the American, becoming suddenly 
conscious of the fact that he had been 
standing for two hours watching the show 
of royalty, and that it had not cost him 
even sixpence, was honest enough to own 
that it was. 

But what excuse have the Austrian roy- 
alties ever offered for their right to exist? 
It is not quite enough that they have six- 
teen quarterings, and that they are exclu- 
sive, and only come out of their highly 
polished shells once in a great while, when 
one of them shocks half of Europe with a 
horrible scandal or a silly marriage. For 
it is only when such things happen that we 
learn anything of the most exclusive Court 
in Europe — when one of its archdukes 
tramps a stable-boy under his horse's hoofs, 
or comes out of the wood into the world — 
to marry a dancing-girl. 

95 



THE MILLENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BUDAPEST 

Perhaps the eleven hundred men who 
represented all of Hungary at the millen- 
nial celebration will cheer one of these 
archdukes when he comes to the throne. 
But it may be that when the time comes 
they will prefer a king who can speak their 
own language, and that we may hear them 
cheer one of their own people. 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



I. -THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ 

ADOLFO RODRIGUEZ was the 
only son of a Cuban farmer, who 
lives nine miles outside of Santa Clara, 
beyond the hills that surround that city 
to the north. 

When the revolution broke out young 
Rodriguez joined the insurgents, leaving 
his father and mother and two sisters at 
the farm. He was taken, in December of 
1 896, by a force of the Guardia Civile, the 
corps d'elite of the Spanish army, and de- 
fended himself when they tried to capture 
him, wounding three of them with his ma- 
chete. 

He was tried by a military court for 
bearing arms against the government, and 

99 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

sentenced to be shot by a fusillade some 
morning before sunrise. 

Previous to execution he was confined 
in the military prison of Santa Clara with 
thirty other insurgents, all of whom were 
sentenced to be shot, one after the other, 
on mornings following the execution of 
Rodriguez. 

His execution took place the morning of 
the 19th of January, 1897, at a place a half- 
mile distant from the city, on the great 
plain that stretches from the forts out to 
the hills, beyond which Rodriguez had 
lived for nineteen years. At the time of 
his death he was twenty years old. 

I witnessed his execution, and what fol- 
lows is an account of the way he went to 
death. The young man's friends could not 
be present, for it was impossible for them 
to show themselves in that crowd and that 
place with wisdom or without distress, and 
I like to think that, although Rodriguez 
could not know it, there was one person 

present when he died who felt keenly for 

100 




THE DEATH OF RODRIGUEZ 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

him, and who was a sympathetic though 
unwilling spectator. 

There had been a full moon the night 
preceding the execution, and when the 
squad of soldiers marched out from town 
it was still shining brightly through the 
mists, although it was past five o'clock. 
It lighted a plain two miles in extent, 
broken by ridges and gullies and covered 
with thick, high grass, and with bunches 
of cactus and palmetto. In the hollow of 
the ridges the mist lay like broad lakes of 
water, and on one side of the plain stood 
the walls of the old town. On the other 
rose hills covered with royal palms that 
showed white in the moonlight, like hun- 
dreds of marble columns. A line of tiny 
camp-fires that the sentries had built dur- 
ing the night stretched between the forts 
at regular intervals and burned brightly. 

But as the light grew stronger and the 
moonlight faded these were stamped out, 
and when the soldiers came in force the 
moon was a white ball in the sky, without 

IOI 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

radiance, the fires had sunk to ashes, and 
the sun had not yet risen. 

So even when the men were formed into 
three sides of a hollow square, they were 
scarcely able to distinguish one another in 
the uncertain light of the morning. 

There were about three hundred soldiers 
in the formation. They belonged to the 
volunteers, and they deployed upon the 
plain with their band in front playing a 
jaunty quickstep, while their officers gal- 
loped from one side to the other through 
the grass, seeking out a suitable place for 
the execution, while the band outside the 
line still played merrily. 

A few men and boys, who had been 
dragged out of their beds by the music, 
moved about the ridges behind the sol- 
diers, half -clothed, unshaven, sleepy-eyed, 
yawning, and stretching themselves ner- 
vously and shivering in the cool, damp air 
of the morning. 

Either owing to discipline or on account 
of the nature of their errand, or because 

102 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

the men were still but half awake, there 
was no talking in the ranks, and the sol- 
diers stood motionless, leaning on their 
rifles, with their backs turned to the town, 
looking out across the plain to the hills. 

The men in the crowd behind them were 
also grimly silent. They knew that what- 
ever they might say would be twisted into 
a word of sympathy for the condemned 
man or a protest against the government. 
So no one spoke ; even the officers gave 
their orders in gruff whispers, and the men 
in the crowd did not mix together, but 
looked suspiciously at one another and 
kept apart. 

As the light increased a mass of people 
came hurrying from the town with two 
black figures leading them, and the sol- 
diers drew up at attention, and part of the 
double line fell back and left an opening 
in the square. 

With us a condemned man walks only 
the short distance from his cell to the scaf- 
fold or the electric chair, shielded from sight 

103 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

by the prison walls, and it often occurs even 
then that the short journey is too much for 
his strength and courage. 

But the merciful Spaniards on this morn- 
ing made the prisoner walk for over a half- 
mile across the broken surface of the fields. 
I expected to find the man, no matter what 
his strength at other times might be, stum- 
bling and faltering on this cruel journey ; 
but as he came nearer I saw that he led all 
the others, that the priests on either side 
of him were taking two steps to his one, 
and that they were tripping on their gowns 
and stumbling over the hollows in their 
efforts to keep pace with him as he walked, 
erect and soldierly, at a quick step in ad- 
vance of them. 

He had a handsome, gentle face of the 
peasant type, a light, pointed beard, great 
wistful eyes, and a mass of curly black hair. 
He was shockingly young for such a sacri- 
fice, and looked more like a Neapolitan than 
a Cuban. You could imagine him sitting 

on the quay at Naples or Genoa, lolling in 

104 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

the sun and showing his white teeth when 
he laughed. He wore a new scapular around 
his neck, hanging outside his linen blouse. 

It seems a petty thing to have been 
pleased with at such a time, but I confess 
to have felt a thrill of satisfaction when I 
saw, as the Cuban passed me, that he held 
a cigarette between his lips, not arrogantly 
nor with bravado, but with the nonchalance 
of a man who meets his punishment fear- 
lessly, and who will let his enemies see that 
they can kill but cannot frighten him. 

It was very quickly finished, with rough 
and, but for one frightful blunder, with 
merciful swiftness. The crowd fell back 
when it came to the square, and the con- 
demned man, the priests, and the firing 
squad of six young volunteers passed in 
and the line closed behind them. 

The officer who had held the cord that 
bound the Cuban's arms behind him and 
passed across his breast let it fall on the 
grass and drew his sword, and Rodriguez 
dropped his cigarette from his lips and bent 

105 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



and kissed the cross which the priest held 
up before him. 

The elder of the priests moved to one 
side and prayed rapidly in a loud whisper, 
while the other, a younger man, walked 
away behind the firing squad and covered 
his face with his hands and turned his back. 
They had both spent the last twelve hours 
with Rodriguez in the chapel of the prison. 

The Cuban walked to where the officer 
directed him to stand, and turned his back 
to the square and faced the hills and the 
road across them, which led to his father's 
farm. 

As the officer gave the first command 
he straightened himself as far as the cords 
would allow, and held up his head and fixed 
his eyes immovably on the morning light, 
which had just begun to show above the 
hills. 

He made a picture of such pathetic help- 
lessness, but of such courage and dignity, 
that he reminded me on the instant of that 

statue of Nathan Hale which stands in the 

1 06 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

City Hall Park, above the roar of Broad- 
way, and teaches a lesson daily to the hur- 
rying crowds of money-makers who pass 
beneath. 

The Cubans arms were bound, as are 
those of the statue, and he stood firmly, 
with his weight resting on his heels like a 
soldier on parade, and with his face held 
up fearlessly, as is that of the statue. But 
there was this difference, that Rodriguez, 
while probably as willing to give six lives 
for his country as was the American rebel, 
being only a peasant, did not think to say 
so, and he will not, in consequence, live in 
bronze during the lives of many men, but 
will be remembered only as one of thirty 
Cubans, one of whom was shot at Santa 
Clara on each succeeding day at sunrise. 

The officer had given the order, the men 

had raised their pieces, and the condemned 

man had heard the clicks of the triggers as 

they were pulled back, and he had not 

moved. And then happened one of the 

most cruelly refined, though unintentional, 

107 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

acts of torture that one can very well im- 
agine. As the officer slowly raised his 
sword, preparatory to giving the signal, 
one of the mounted officers rode up to him 
and pointed out silently what I had already 
observed with some satisfaction, that the 
firing squad were so placed that when they 
fired they would shoot several of the sol- 
diers stationed on the extreme end of the 
square. 

Their captain motioned his men to low- 
er their pieces, and then walked across the 
grass and laid his hand on the shoulder of 
the waiting prisoner. 

It is not pleasant to think what that 
shock must have been. The man had 
steeled himself to receive a volley of bullets 
in his back. He believed that in the next 
instant he would be in another world ; he 
had heard the command given, had heard 
the click of the Mausers as the locks 
caught — and then, at that supreme mo- 
ment, a human hand had been laid upon 
his shoulder and a voice spoke in his ear. 

108 




REGULAR CAVALRYMAN — SPANISH 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

You would expect that any man who 
had been snatched back to life in such a 
fashion would start and tremble at the re- 
prieve, or would break down altogether, 
but this boy turned his head steadily, and 
followed with his eyes the direction of the 
officer's sword, then nodded his head 
gravely, and, with his shoulders squared, 
took up a new position, straightened his 
back again, and once more held himself 
erect. 

As an exhibition of self - control this 
should surely rank above feats of heroism 
performed in battle, where there are thou- 
sands of comrades to give inspiration. 
This man was alone, in the sight of the 
hills he knew, with only enemies about 
him, with no source to draw on for strength 
but that which lay within himself. 

The officer of the firing squad, mortified 

by his blunder, hastily whipped up his 

sword, the men once more levelled their 

rifles, the sword rose, dropped, and the 

men fired. At the report the Cuban's 

109 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

head snapped back almost between his 
shoulders, but his body fell slowly, as 
though some one had pushed him gently 
forward from behind and he had stumbled. 

He sank on his side in the wet grass 
without a struggle or sound, and did not 
move again. 

It was difficult to believe that he meant 
to lie there, that it could be ended so with- 
out a word, that the man in the linen suit 
would not get up on his feet and continue 
to walk on over the hills, as he apparently 
had started to do, to his home ; that there 
was not a mistake somewhere, or that at 
least some one would be sorry or say some- 
thing or run to pick him up. 

But, fortunately, he did not need help, 
and the priests returned — the younger one 
with the tears running down his face — and 
donned their vestments and read a brief 
requiem for his soul, while the squad stood 
uncovered, and the men in hollow square 
shook their accoutrements into place, and 
shifted their pieces and got ready for the 



no 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

order to march, and the band began again 
with the same quickstep which the fusillade 
had interrupted. 

The figure still lay on the grass un- 
touched, and no one seemed to remember 
that it had walked there of itself, or noticed 
that the cigarette still burned, a tiny ring 
of living fire, at the place where the figure 
had first stood. 

The figure was a thing of the past, and 
the squad shook itself like a great snake, 
and then broke into little pieces and started 
off jauntily, stumbling in the high grass 
and striving to keep step to the music. 

The officers led it past the figure in the 
linen suit, and so close to it that the file 
closers had to part with the column to avoid 
treading on it. Each soldier as he passed 
turned and looked down on it, some cran- 
ing their necks curiously, others giving a 
careless glance, and some without any in- 
terest at all, as they would have looked at 
a house by the roadside or a passing cart 

or a hole in the road. 

in 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

One young soldier caught his foot in a 
trailing vine, and fell just opposite to it. 
He grew very red when his comrades gig- 
gled at him for his awkwardness. The 
crowd of sleepy spectators fell in on either 
side of the band. They had forgotten it, 
too, and the priests put their vestments 
back in the bag and wrapped their heavy 
cloaks about them, and hurried off after the 
others. 

Every one seemed to have forgotten it 
except two men, who came slowly towards 
it from the town, driving a bullock -cart 
that bore an unplaned coffin, each with a 
cigarette between his lips, and with his 
throat wrapped in a shawl to keep out the 
morning mists. 

At that moment the sun, which had 
shown some promise of its coming in the 
glow above the hills, shot up suddenly 
from behind them in all the splendor of 
the tropics, a fierce, red disk of heat, and 
filled the air with warmth and light. 

The bayonets of the retreating column 

112 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

flashed in it, and at the sight of it a rooster 
in a farm-yard near by crowed vigorously, 
and a dozen bugles answered the challenge 
with the brisk, cheery notes of the reveille, 
and from all parts of the city the church 
bells jangled out the call for early mass, 
and the whole world of Santa Clara seemed 
to stir and stretch itself and to wake to 
welcome the day just begun. 

But as I fell in at the rear of the proces- 
sion and looked back, the figure of the 
young Cuban, who was no longer a part of 
the world of Santa Clara, was asleep in the 
wet grass, with his motionless arms still 
tightly bound behind him, with the scap- 
ular twisted awry across his face, and the 
blood from his breast sinking into the soil 
he had tried to free. 



II.-ALONG THE TROCHA 

The Trocha at the eastern end of Cuba 
is the longer of the two, and stretches 
from coast to coast at the narrowest part 

H 113 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

of that half of the island, from Jucaro on 
the south to Moron on the north. 

Before I came to Cuba this time I had 
read in our newspapers about the Spanish 
trochas without knowing just what a tro- 
cha was. I imagined it to be a rampart of 
earth and fallen trees, topped with barbed 
wire — a Rubicon that no one was allowed 
to pass, but which the insurgents appar- 
ently crossed at will with the ease of little 
girls leaping over a flying skipping-rope. 
In reality it seems to be a much more im- 
portant piece of engineering than is gener- 
ally supposed, and one which, when com- 
pleted, may prove an absolute barrier to 
the progress of large bodies of troops un- 
less they are supplied with artillery. 

I saw twenty-five of its fifty miles, and 

the engineers in charge told me that I was 

the first American, or foreigner of any 

nationality, who had been allowed to visit 

it and make drawings and photographs of 

it. Why they allowed me to see it I do 

not know, nor can I imagine either why 

114 











va 






ONE OF THE BI.OCK-HOUSES 
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis) 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

they should have objected to my doing so. 
There is no great mystery about it. 

Indeed, what impressed me most con- 
cerning it was the fact that every bit of 
material used in constructing this back- 
bone of the Spanish defence, this strategic 
point of all their operations, and their chief 
hope of success against the revolutionists, 
was furnished by their despised and hated 
enemies in the United States. Every 
sheet of armor plate, every corrugated zinc 
roof, every roll of barbed wire, every plank, 
beam, rafter, and girder, even the nails that 
hold the planks together, the forts them- 
selves, shipped in sections, which are num- 
bered in readiness for setting up, the ties 
for the military railroad which clings to 
the trocha from one sea to the other — all 
of these have been supplied by manufact- 
urers in the United States. 

This is interesting when one remembers 
that the American in the Spanish illustrated 
papers is represented as a hog, and general- 
ly with the United States flag for trousers, 

115 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

and Spain as a noble and valiant lion. 
Yet it would appear that the lion is willing 
to save a few dollars on freight by buying 
his armament from his hoggish neighbor, 
and that the American who cheers for 
Cuba Libre is not at all averse to making 
as many dollars as he can in building the 
wall against which the Cubans may be 
eventually driven and shot. 

A thick jungle stretches for miles on 
either side of the trocha, and the only way 
of reaching it from the outer world is 
through the seaports at either end. Of 
these, Moron is all but landlocked, and 
Jucaro is guarded by a chain of keys, 
which make it necessary to reship all the 
troops and their supplies and all the ma- 
terial for the trocha to lighters, which meet 
the vessels six miles out at sea. 

A dirty Spanish steamer drifted, with us 
for two nights and a day from Cienfuegos 
to Jucaro, and three hundred Spanish, sol- 
diers, dusty, ragged and barefooted, own- 
ed her as completely as though she had 

116 




% 






t 



4 



'<-<- 




s- 



. 







CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

been a regular transport. They sprawled 
at full length over every deck, their guns 
were stacked in each corner, and their 
hammocks swung four deep from railings 
and riggings and across companion-ways, 
and even from the bridge itself. It was 
not possible to take a step without tread- 
ing on one of them, and their hammocks 
made a walk on the deck something like a 
hurdle-race. 

With the soldiers, and crowding them 
for space, were the officers' mules and 
ponies, steers, calves, and squealing pigs, 
while crates full of chickens were piled on 
top of one another as high as the hurricane 
deck, so that the roosters and the buglers 
vied with each other in continual contests. 
It was like travelling with a floating men- 
agerie. Twice a day the bugles sounded 
the call for breakfast and dinner, and the 
soldiers ceased to sprawl, and squatted on 
the deck around square tin cans filled with 
soup or red wine, from which they fed 
themselves with spoons and into which 

117 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

they dipped their rations of hard-tack, after 
first breaking them on the deck with a blow 
from a bayonet or crushing them with a 
rifle butt. 

The steward brought what was supposed 
to be a sample of this soup to the officer 
seated in the pilot-house high above the 
squalor, and he would pick out a bean 
from the mess on the end of a fork and 
place it to his lips and nod his head grave- 
ly, and the grinning steward would carry 
the dish away. 

But the soldiers seemed to enjoy it very 
much, and to be content— even cheerful. 
There are many things to admire about 
the Spanish Tommy. In the seven for- 
tified cities which I visited, where there 
were thousands of him, I never saw one 
drunk or aggressive, which is much more 
than can be said of his officers. On the 
march he is patient, eager, and alert. He 
trudges from fifteen to thirty miles a day 
over the worst roads ever constructed by 
man, in canvas shoes with rope soles, carry- 

118 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

ing one hundred and fifty cartridges, fifty 
across his stomach and one hundred on 
his back, weighing in all fifty pounds. 

With these he has his Mauser, his 
blanket, and an extra pair of shoes, and as 
many tin plates and bottles and bananas 
and potatoes and loaves of white bread as 
he can stow away in his blouse and knap- 
sack. And this under a sun which makes 
even a walking-stick seem a burden. In 
spite of his officers, and not on account of 
them, he maintains good discipline, and no 
matter how tired he may be or how much 
he may wish to rest on his plank bed, he 
will always struggle to his feet when the 
officers pass and stand at salute. He gets 
very little in return for his efforts. 

One Sunday night, when the band was 

playing in the plaza, at a heaven-forsaken 

fever camp called Ciego de Avila, a group 

of soldiers were sitting near me on the 

grass enjoying the music. They loitered 

there a few minutes after the bu^le had 

sounded the retreat to the barracks, and 

119 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

the officer of the day found them. When 
they stood up he ordered them to report 
themselves at the cartel under arrest, and 
then, losing all control of himself, lashed 
one little fellow over the head with his 
colonel's staff, while the boy stood with 
his eyes shut and with his lips pressed 
together, but holding his hand at salute 
until the officer's stick beat it down. 

These soldiers are from the villages and 
towns of Spain ; some of them are not 
more than seventeen years old, and they 
are not volunteers. They do not care 
whether Spain owns an island eighty miles 
from the United States or loses it, but 
they go out to it and have their pay stolen, 
and are put to building earth forts and 
stone walls, and die of fever. It seems a 
poor return for their unconscious patriot- 
ism when a colonel thrashes one of them 
as though he were a dog, and an especial- 
ly brave act, as he knows the soldier may 
not strike back. 

The second night out the ship steward 

1 20 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

showed us a light lying low in the water, 
and told us that was Jucaro, and we ac- 
cepted his statement and went over the 
side into an open boat, in which we drift- 
ed about until morning, while the colored 
man who owned the boat and a little mu- 
latto boy who steered it quarrelled as to 
where exactly the town of Jucaro might 
be. They brought us up at last against a 
dark shadow of a house, built on wooden 
posts, and apparently floating in the water. 
This was the town of Jucaro as seen at 
that hour of the night, and as we left it be- 
fore sunrise the next morning, I did not 
know until my return whether I had slept 
in a stationary ark or on the end of a wharf. 

We found four other men sleeping on 
the floor in the room assigned us, and out- 
side, eating by a smoking candle, a young 
English boy, who looked up and laughed 
when he heard us speak, and said : 

" You've come at last, have you ? You 
are the first white men I've seen since I 
came here. That's twelve months ago." 

121 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

He was the cable operator at Jucaro, 
and he sits all day in front of a sheet of 
white paper and watches a ray of light 
play across an imaginary line, and he can 
tell by its quivering, so he says, all that is 
going on all over the world. Outside of 
his whitewashed cable -office is the land- 
locked bay, filled with wooden piles to 
keep out the sharks, and back of him lies 
the village of Jucaro, consisting of two 
open places filled with green slime and 
filth and thirty huts. But the operator 
said that what with fishing and bathing 
and Tit -Bits and Lloyd's Weekly Times 
Jucaro was quite enjoyable. He is going 
home the year after this. 

"At least, that's how I put it," he ex- 
plained. "My contract requires me to stop 
on here until December of 1898, but it 
doesn't sound so long if you say ' a year 
after this,' does it?" He had had the 
yellow -fever and had never, owing to 
the war, been outside of Jucaro. " Still," 

he added, " I'm seeing the world, and 

122 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

I've always wanted to visit foreign 
parts." 

As one of the few clean persons I met 
in Cuba, and the only contented one, I 
hope the cable operator at Jucaro will get 
a rise in salary soon, and some day see 
more of foreign parts than he is seeing at 
present, and at last get back to " the Horse- 
shoe, at the corner of Tottenham Court 
Road and Oxford Street, sir," where, as we 
agreed, better entertainment is to be had on 
Saturday night than anywhere in London. 

In Havana, General Weyler had given 
me a pass to enter fortified places, which, 
except for the authority which the signa- 
ture implied, meant nothing, as all the 
cities and towns in Cuba are fortified, and 
any one can visit them. It was as though 
Mayor Strong had given a man a permit 
to ride in all the cable cars attached to 
cables. 

It was not intended to include the trocha, 

but I argued that if a trocha was not a 

" fortified place " nothing else was ; and I 

123 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



persuaded the commandante at Jucaro to 
take that view of it and to vise Weyler's 
order. So at five the following morning 
a box - car, with wooden planks stretched 
across it for seats, carried me along the 
line of the trocha from Jucaro to Ciego, 
the chief military port on the fortifications, 
and consumed five hot and stifling hours 
in covering twenty-five miles. 

The trocha is a cleared space one hun- 
dred and fifty to two hundred yards wide, 
which stretches for fifty miles through what 
is apparently an impassable jungle. The 
trees which have been cut down in clear- 
ing this passageway have been piled up at 
either side of the cleared space and laid 
in parallel rows, forming a barrier of tree- 
trunks and roots and branches as wide as 
Broadway and higher than a man's head. 
It would take a man some time to pick his 
way over these barriers, and a horse could 
no more do it than it could cross a jam of 
floating logs in a river. 

Between the fallen trees lies the single 

124 




THE TROCHA 
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis) 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

track of the military railroad, and on one 
side of that is the line of forts, and a few 
feet beyond them a maze of barbed wire. 
Beyond the barbed wire again is the other 
barrier of fallen trees and the jungle. In 
its unfinished state this is not an insur- 
mountable barricade. Gomez crossed it 
last November by daylight with six hun- 
dred men, and with but the loss of twenty- 
seven killed and as many wounded. To- 
day it would be more difficult, and in a few 
months, without the aid of artillery, it will 
be impossible, except with the sacrifice of 
a great loss of life. The forts are of three 
kinds. They are best described as the 
forts, the block-houses, and the little forts. 
A big fort consists of two stories, with a 
cellar below and a watch-tower above. It 
is made of stone and adobe, and is painted 
a glaring white. One of these is placed at 
intervals of every half-mile along the trocha, 
and on a clear clay the sentry in the watch- 
tower of each can see three forts on either 
side. 

125 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

Midway between the big forts, at a dis- 
tance of a quarter of a mile from each, is a 
block-house of two stories, with the upper 
story of wood overhanging the lower foun- 
dation of mud. These are placed at right 
angles to the railroad, instead of facing it, 
as do the forts. 

Between each block-house and each fort 
are three little forts of mud and planks, 
surrounded by a ditch. They look some- 
thing like a farmer's ice-house as we see it 
at home, and they are about as hot inside 
as the other is cold. They hold five men, 
and are within hailing distance of one 
another. Back of them are three rows 
of stout wooden stakes, with barbed wire 
stretching from one row to the other, in- 
terlacing and crossing and runninsf in and 

o o o 

out above and below like an intricate cat's- 

cradle of wire. 

One can judge how closely knit it is by 

the fact that to every twelve yards of posts 

there are four hundred and fifty yards of 

wire fencing. The forts are most com- 

126 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

pletely equipped in their way, but twelve 
men in the jungle would find it quite easy 
to keep twelve men securely imprisoned 
in one of them for an indefinite length of 
time. 

The walls are about twelve feet high, 
with a cellar below and a vault above the 
cellar. The roof of the vault forms a plat- 
form, around which the four walls rise to 
the height of a man's shoulder. There are 
loopholes for rifles in the sides of the vault 
and where the platform joins the walls. 
These latter allow the men in the fort to 
fire down almost directly upon the head of 
any one who comes up close to the wall of 
the fort, where without these holes in the 
floor it would be impossible to fire on him 
except by leaning far over the rampart. 

Above the platform is an iron or zinc 
roof, supported by iron pillars, and in the 
centre of this is the watch-tower. The only 
approach to the fort is by a movable ladder, 
which hangs over the side like the gang- 
way of a ship - of - war, and can be raised 

127 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



by those on the inside by means of a rope 
suspended over a wheel in the roof. The 
opening in the wall at the head of the lad- 
der is closed at the time of an attack by an 
iron platform, to which the ladder leads, 
and which also can be raised by a pulley. 
In October of 1897 the Spanish hope to 
have calcium lights placed in the watch- 
towers of the forts with sufficient power 
to throw a search-light over a quarter of 
a mile, or to the next block-house, and so 
keep the trocha as well lighted as Broad- 
way from one end to the other. 

As a further protection against the in- 
surgents, the Spaniards have distributed a 
number of bombs along the trocha, which 
they showed with great pride. These are 
placed at those points along the trocha 
where the jungle is less thickly grown, and 
where the insurgents might be expected to 
pass. 

Each bomb is fitted with an explosive 
cap, to which five or six wires are attached 
and staked down on the ground. Any on 



128 




ONE OF THE FORTS ALONG THE TROCHA 
(From a photograph taken by Mr. Davis) 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

stumbling over one of these wires explodes 
the bomb and throws a charge of broken 
iron to a distance of fifty feet. How the 
Spaniards are going to prevent stray cattle 
and their own soldiers from wandering into 
these man-traps it is difficult to understand. 
The chief engineer in charge of the 
trocha detailed a captain to take me over 
it and to show me all that there was to see. 
The officers of the infantry and cavalry 
stationed at Ciego objected to his doing 
this, but he said : " He has a pass from 
General Weyler. I am not responsible." 
It was true that I had an order from Gen- 
eral Weyler, but he had rendered it in- 
effective by having me followed about 
wherever I went by his police and spies. 
They sat next to me in the cafes and in 
the plazas, and when I took a cab they 
called the next one on the line and trailed 
after mine all around the city, until my 
driver would become alarmed for fear he, 
too, was suspected of something, and would 

take me back to the hotel, 
i 129 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

I had gotten rid of them at Cienfuegos 
by purchasing a ticket on the steamer to 
Santiago, three days farther down the coast, 
and then dropping off in the night at the 
trocha ; so while I was visiting it I expected 
to find that my non-arrival at Santiago had 
been reported, and word sent to the trocha 
that I was a newspaper correspondent. And 
whenever an officer spoke to the one who 
was showing me about, my camera ap- 
peared to grow to the size of a trunk and 
to weigh like lead, and I felt lonely, and 
longed for the company of the cheerful ca- 
ble operator at the other end of the trocha. 

Ciegowas an interesting town. During 
every day of the last rainy season an aver- 
age of thirty soldiers and officers died there 
of yellow-fever. While I was there I saw 
two soldiers, one quite an old man, drop 
down in the street as though they had been 
shot, and lie in the road until they were 
carried to the yellow-fever ward of the hos- 
pital under the black oilskin cloth of the 

stretchers. 

130 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

There was a very smart officers' club at 
Ciego, well supplied with a bar and billiard- 
tables, which I made some excuse for not 
entering, but which could be seen through 
its open doors ; and I suggested to one of 
the members that it must be a comfort to 
have such a place, where the officers might 
go after their day's march on the mud 
banks of the trocha, and where they could 
bathe and be cool and clean. He said 
there were no baths in the club nor any- 
where in the town. He added that he 
thought it might be a good idea to have 
them. 

The bath-tub is the dividing line be- 
tween savages and civilized beings. And 
when I learned that regiment after regi- 
ment of Spanish officers and gentlemen 
have been stationed in that town — and it 
was the dirtiest, hottest, and dustiest town 
I ever visited — for eighteen months, and 
none of them had wanted a bath, I be- 
lieved from that moment all the stories I 

had heard about their butcheries and atroc- 

131 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 



ities — stories which I had verified later by 
more direct evidence. 

From a military point of view the trocha 
impressed me as a weapon which could be 
made to cut both ways. 

If it were situated on a broad plain or 
prairie, with a mile of clear ground on 
either side of it where troops could ma- 
noeuvre, and which would prevent the en- 
emy from stealing up to it unseen, it might 
be a useful line of defence. But at present, 
alone its entire length stretches this almost 
impassable barrier of jungle. If troops 
were sent at short notice from the military 
camps along the line to protect any partic- 
ular point, one can imagine what their con- 
dition would be were they forced to ma- 
noeuvre in a space one hundred and fifty 
yards broad, the half of which is taken up 
with barbed wire fences, fallen trees, and 
explosive bomb-shells. Only two hundred 
at the most could find shelter in the forts, 
which would mean that many more would 

be left outside the breastworks and scat- 

132 




■pirn- "— ,,^-~ 



SPANISH CAVALRY 




m 



mm 




■■BHHB 



SPANISH CAVALRY 
(From photographs by Mr. Davis) 



CUBA IN WAR-TIME 

tered over a distance of a half-mile, with a 
forest on both sides of them from which 
the enemy could fire volley after volley into 
their ranks, protected from pursuit not only 
by the jungle but by the walls of fallen 
trees which the Spaniards themselves have 
placed there. 

A trocha in an open plain, as were the 
English trochas in the desert around Sua- 
kin, makes an admirable defence when a 
few men are forced to withstand the assault 
of a great many ; but fighting behind a 
trocha in a jungle is like fighting in an 
ambush, and if the trocha at Moron is 
ever attacked in force it may prove to be 
a Valley of Death to the Spanish troops. 



THE INAUGURATION 



THE INAUGURATION 



WHEN the Vice-President of the 
United States is sworn into office 
he takes the oath in the same Senate-Cham- 
ber where, later, he is to preside over a 
limited, and, in one sense, a select body of 
men. But as the President of the United 
States presides over the entire nation, he 
takes his oath of office in the presence of 
as many of the American people as can 
see him, and he is not shut in by the close 
walls of a room, but stands in the open 
air, under the open sky, with the marble 
heights of the House of Representatives 
and of the Senate for his background, and 
with the great dome of the Capitol for his 
sounding-board. 

The two ceremonies differ greatly. One 

137 



THE INAUGURATION 

suggests the director of a railroad address- 
ing the stockholders at their annual meet- 
ing, while the other is as impressive in its 
simplicity as Moses talking to the chosen 
people from the mountain-side. 

The Chamber of the Senate is a great 
oblong room, with a heavy gallery running 
back from an unbroken front to each of 
the four walls, and rising almost to the 
ceiling. There is a carpet on the floor, 
and rows of school-desks placed in curved 
lines, facing a platform and three short 
rows of chairs. The first row, where the 
official stenographers sit, is on the floor of 
the Senate - Chamber ; the second, for the 
clerks, is raised above it ; and higher still, 
behind the clerks, is the massive desk of 
the Vice-President, or the President of the 
Senate, as he is called when he presides 
over that body. Opposite to the desk of 
the Vice-President, and at each side of it, 
are wide entrances with swinging doors. 
The Chamber is lighted from above, and 

is decorated in quiet colors. 

138 




THE VICE-PRESIDENT TAKING THE OATH OF OFFICE 



THE INAUGURATION 

On the morning of the 4th of March 
last the galleries were massed with people, 
and the Senators, instead of sitting each at 
his own desk, crowded together to see the 
Vice-President inaugurated, while several 
hundreds of yellow chairs were squeezed 
in among the school -desks for the use of 
the members of the House. In front of 
the clerk's desk were two leather chairs, 
for the new President and the old Presi- 
dent, and the seats for the foreign ambas- 
sadors. 

It had been an all-night session, and the 
Senators had remained in the Chamber un- 
til near sunrise, and looked rumpled and 
weary in consequence. Among them were 
several men whose term of office would ex- 
pire when the clock over the door told mid- 
day ; they had been six years or less in that 
room, and in three-quarters of an hour they 
would leave it perhaps for the last time. 
The men who had taken their seats from 
them, and who were to be sworn in by the 
new Vice-President, sat squeezed in beside 

139 



THE INAUGURATION 

them, looking conscious and uncomfortable, 
like new boys on their first day at school. 
Caricaturists and the artists of the daily 
papers had made the faces of many of 
them familiar, and while the people waited 
for the chief actors to appear, they pointed 
out the more conspicuous Senators to each 
other, looking down upon them with the 
same interest that visitors to the Zoo be- 
stow on the bears. 

In the front of the gallery reserved for 
the diplomatic corps sat the wife of the 
Chinese minister. She was the only bit 
of color in the room that was not Ameri- 
can or imported from Paris. She was a 
little person in blue satin, with a great 
head-dress of red, and her face was painted 
like the face of a picture, according to the 
custom of her country. 

Back of her, accompanied by her secre- 
tary, was the exiled Queen of Hawaii, a 
handsome, dark-skinned negress, quietly 
but richly dressed, and carrying herself 
with great dignity. In front of her was 



THE INAUGURATION 

a young English peer, a secretary of the 
British Embassy, who took photographs 
of the scene below him with a hand-cam- 
era, knowing perfectly well that had he 
been guilty of such a piece of impertinence 
in his own Lower House he would have 
been taken out of the gallery by the collar 
and thrown into the lobby. 

The expectant quiet of the hour was 
first broken by a young man with his hair 
banged over his forehead and a fluffy satin 
tie that drooped upon his breast. He 
gazed meekly about him out of round 
spectacles and announced in a high, shrill 
voice : 

" The ambassadors from foreign coun- 
tries." 

In the courts of Europe, where they 
take state ceremonies more seriously than 
we do, there is a functionary who is known 
as the " Announcer of Ambassadors," or 
the "Introducer of Ambassadors" — his 
title explains his duties. The American 
introducer of ambassadors was a subordi- 

141 



THE INAUGURATION 

nate official, and although we are a free 
people and love simplicity and hate show, 
it did seem as though, for that occasion 
only, some one with a little more manner, 
or a little less ease of manner, might have 
been chosen to announce the various die- 
nitaries as they entered the Chamber. A 
thin young man in a short sack-coat run- 
ning excitedly up and down the aisle lead- 
ing to the President's desk did not exact- 
ly seem to rise to the requirements of 
the occasion ; especially was this the case 
when he put his hand on the breast of 
the first of the ambassadors and shoved 
him back until he was ready to announce 
him. 

The foreign ambassadors were four in 
number, and very beautiful in their diplo- 
matic uniforms and sashes of the royal or- 
ders. They seated themselves, with obvi- 
ous content, in places on a line with those 
reserved for the President and President- 
elect. 

The young man skipped gayly back up 

142 



THE INAUGURATION 

the aisle and announced, " The members of 
the Supreme Court of the United States," 
and the Chief Justice and his fellow-judges 
came rustling forward in black silk robes 
and seated themselves facing the ambassa- 
dors, and then all of them with one accord 
crossed their legs. 

The "ministers from foreign lands" came 
next in a glittering line, and crowded into 
the second row of school-desks, shunting 
and shifting themselves about several times, 
like cars in a freight-yard when a train is 
being made up, until each was in his right 
place and no one's dignity was jeoparded. 
Then came the Speaker of the House of 
Representatives, who ascended the steps 
leading to the desk and took his place next 
to the chairs reserved for the incoming 
Vice - President and the outgoing Vice- 
President, and looked down at the empty 
red chair below him, on which, had the 
pleasure of many people been consulted, 
he would have sat that day. 

The other members of the House poured 

143 



THE INAUGURATION 

into the room without order or precedence, 
and spread themselves over the floor, pick- 
ing up the yellow chairs and carrying them 
nearer to the front, or shoving them out of 
their way and piling them up one on top of 
the other in the corners. There were very 
young men among them, and many old and 
well-known men, and they had smuggled in 
with them Governors of States, with a few 
of their aides in uniform, and a number of 
lobbyists, and politicians out of office, but 
with much more power than those to whom 
they had given it. Then quietly from a 
side door behind the President's desk came 
Major-General Nelson A. Miles, commander 
of the United States army, and the naval 
officer who ranked him, and their adju- 
tants ; and opposite to them, from the oth- 
er door, appeared the next ambassador to 
France, who, as the marshal of the great 
parade which was to follow, and on account 
of his promised new dignity, was one of the 
celebrities of the hour. The three aides 

of General Porter were the sons of former 

144 



THE INAUGURATION 

Presidents. The youngest of them was 
young Garfield, a modest, manly, good- 
looking boy in the uniform of a cavalry 
officer. 

In the gallery to the left of the Presi- 
dent's desk were three empty rows of 
benches, which, as every one knew by this 
time, were reserved for the family of the 
incoming President, and the first real in- 
terest of the morning arrived when the 
doors above this gallery were held open, 
and the ladies who were to occupy these 
places, and later, so large a place in the 
interest of the country, appeared at the top 
of the steps. Portraits and photographs 
rendered it easy to recognize them, and 
though the spectators gave no sign of wel- 
come to these unofficial members of the 
President's household, they held every eye 
in the place. The mother of the incoming 
President came down the steps briskly, as 
eager and smiling and young as her son 
in spite of her white hair and gold spec- 
tacles. The people smiled back at her in 
K 145 



THE INAUGURATION 

sympathy with her pleasure at his triumph, 
and the scene at once took on a human 
interest it had not held before. For while 
it is possible at any time to look at ambas- 
sadors in diamond stars and brave soldiers 
in gold lace, it is not possible every day to 
see a mother as she watches her son at the 
moment when he takes the oath that makes 
him the executive head of seventy millions 
of people. 

The wife of the new President followed 
his mother slowly. She had been ill, and 
as she came down the steps she was partly 
supported on each side by one of her hus- 
band's friends. Her face was very pale, 
but quite beautiful and young-looking, like 
that of a girl, and the blue velvet that she 
wore softened and enriched the noble lines 
which pain and great suffering had cut on 
her face. 

The young man with the butterfly tie 
and the short coat dashed up and down the 
middle aisle now with hysterical vigor, and 

announced over his shoulder during one 

146 



THE INAUGURATION 

of his flights that the " Vice-President and 
the Vice-President-elect" were approach- 
ing. Mr. Stevenson came in, with Mr. 
Hobart following him, and the two men 
ascended the steps of the platform and 
bowed to Speaker Reed, who rose to greet 
them. 

There were now only the two chief 
actors to come, and the crowded room 
waited with its interest at the highest 
pitch. The members of Congress who 
had crowded in around the doorways were 
pushed back on each other, and those who 
had slipped down the aisles slid in be- 
tween the desks, as the young man an- 
nounced " The President and President- 
elect." 

As Mr. Cleveland and Major McKinley 
entered, walking close together, the people 
rose, and every one leaned forward for a 
better sight of the President to be, and to 
observe " how the outgoing President took 
it." The outgoing President took it ex- 
ceedingly well. He could afford to do so. 

147 



THE INAUGURATION 

He had taken that short walk down that 
same aisle often before, and he looked as 
though he took it now for the last time 
with satisfaction and content. He smiled 
slightly as he passed between his enemies 
of the Senate. He could afford to do that 
also, for he had kept a country at peace 
when they had tried to drag it into war, 
and he had framed the great Treaty of 
Arbitration which they had emasculated in 
order to hurt him, and only succeeding in 
hurting themselves. 

As the two men walked down the aisle 
together, Major McKinley with all his 
troubles before him, in his fresh, new 
clothes, and with an excited, nervous smile 
on his clear-cut face, looked like a bride- 
groom ; and Mr. Cleveland, smiling toler- 
antly, and with that something about him 
of dignity which comes to a man who has 
held great power, looked like his best man, 
who had been through the ordeal himself 
and had cynical doubts as to the future. 

As the two men seated themselves, Mr. 

148 



THE INAUGURATION 

Cleveland on the right and Major Mc Kin- 
ley on the left, the latter looked up at the 
gallery where his wife and mother sat and 
gave them a quick bow of recognition, as 
though he wished them to feel that they, 
too, were included in this, his moment of 
triumph. 

The ceremony which followed was brief 
and full of business. Mr. Stevenson read 
a farewell address to the Senators, in which 
he said flattering things to them and 
thanked them for their courtesies ; and a 
clergyman read a long prayer, almost as 
long as the address of the Vice-President, 
while the Senators gazed at their friends 
in the galleries, and three people in the 
gallery stood up, while the greater number 
sat staring about them. Then Mr. Steven- 
son delivered the oath to Mr. Hobart, and 
Mr. Hobart took the oath by bowing his 
head gravely, and the country was on the 
instant in the strange position of having 
a Democratic President and a Republican 
Vice-President. Mr. Hobart read his ad- 

149 



THE INAUGURATION 

dress calmly and in the same manner in 
which the president of a bank might read 
a report to the board of directors. It of 
necessity could not contain anything of a 
startling nature, as the Vice - President's 
duties are entirely those of a presiding 
officer. Mr. Hobart's first duty as Vice- 
President was to swear in the new Sena- 
tors, who came up to his desk in groups of 
four, the incoming Senators being escorted 
by the outgoing Senators. 

When the new Senators had taken the 
oath, the procession formed again with 
the purpose of marching out to the stand 
erected in front of the Senate wine of 
the Capitol, where the chief ceremony 
of the day, the swearing in of the new 
President by the Chief Justice, was to 
take place. 

But the Senate committee who had 
charge of the arrangements, or it may 
have been the young man with the butter- 
fly tie, bungled the procession sadly, and 

the feelings of the diplomatic corps were 

150 



THE INAUGURATION 

hurt. The members of a diplomatic corps 
usually take themselves seriously, and es- 
pecially those in Washington, which is a 
post where they have very little to do ex- 
cept to look after their dignity. And the 
women in Washington spoil them, and the 
rude and untutored American politicians, 
some of whom are opposed on principle to 
the demoralizing practice of wearing even- 
ing dress, do not appreciate the niceties of 
the positions which the foreign diplomatists 
hold to one another. The ministers were 
hurt, in the first place, because the ambas- 
sadors had been allowed to go into the 
Senate -Chamber without them; they did 
not like the places assigned them after 
they had arrived there ; and when the pro- 
cession started they found themselves left 
to follow Congressmen and others before 
whom they should have taken precedence. 
So, instead of going out on to the platform 
to witness the inauguration of the Presi- 
dent, they held an indignation meeting in 
the draughty corridors and decided to go 

151 



THE INAUGURATION 



home, which they did. These gentlemen 
were the guests of the nation, and the 
members of Congress and of the judiciary 
are our own people and acted as their 
hosts. Common courtesy and the conven- 
tion which exists in other countries en- 
join it upon a government to give the 
diplomatic corps precedence of the local 
administrators, just as a host gives the 
better place at dinner to the visiting 
stranger, and not to members of his own 
family. If a thing is worth doing, it is 
worth doing correctly, and either there 
should be no precedence at all or it should 
mean something, and should show what it 
means. Neither the members of the Sen- 
ate nor of the House gained any credit or 
additional glory by shoving themselves 
into places which should by right and 
courtesy have been given to the foreign 
ministers. The diplomatic corps, on the 
other hand, were there as representatives 
of friendly powers to show respect to the 

new President; and if, through no fault of 

152 



THE INAUGURATION 

his, they were treated with insufficient con- 
sideration, it would surely have been better 
for them to witness the ceremonies and 
afterwards to lodge their complaint. But 
to go away pouting like a parcel of children 
with their toys under their arms was dis- 
tinctly disrespectful to the President, and 
was hardly the act of gentlemen, not even 
of diplomats. 

The platform to which the procession 
made its way was built out upon the steps 
of the Capitol, between the Senate wing 
and the main entrance. It was construct- 
ed of unplaned boards, with a raised dais 
in front, upon which were three arm-chairs 
and a table ; around this dais were many 
chairs for the chief dignitaries, and behind 
this chosen circle were unplaned benches 
slanting back like hurdles to the wall of 
the Capitol. There were more than enough 
of these benches, and the spectators from 
the Senate-Chamber did not suffice to fill 
more than half of them. Hence, at 
the back of the crowd on the stand 

153 



THE INAUGURATION 

was an ugly blank stretch of yellow-pine 
boards, which, besides being undecorative 
in itself, gave the erroneous impression 
that there was not as full a house as had 
been expected, and that the attraction had 
failed to attract. Except for this blot of 
pine boards, the picture as the crowd saw 
it, looking up from the grounds of the 
Capitol, was a noble and impressive one, 
full of dignity and meaning. Any scene, 
with the Capitol building for a background, 
must, of necessity, be impressive. Its sit- 
uation is more imposing than that of the 
legislative buildings of any other country ; 
the Houses of Parliament on the Thames, 
and at Budapest, on the Danube, appear 
heavy and sombre in comparison ; the 
Chamber of Deputies, on the Seine, is not 
to be compared with it in any way. No 
American can look upon it, and see its 
great swelling dome, balanced on the broad 
shoulders of the two marble wings, and 
the myriads of steps leading to it, without 
feeling a thrill of pride and pleasure that 

154 



THE INAUGURATION 

so magnificent a monument should belong 
to his country and to him. 

Rising directly above the heads of the 
crowd was the front of the platform, 
wrapped with American flags and colored 
bunting; above that was the black mass 
of the spectators, with just here and there 
a bit of color in a woman's gown, or in the 
uniforms of the ambassadors and of the 
few officers of the army and militia. Be- 
yond these the crowd saw the empty 
boards glaring in the sunshine ; and then 
the grand facade of the Capitol, black with 
spectators, on the steps, on the great stat- 
ues, along the roof, and around the dome. 
The crowd gathered there were so far dis- 
tant that what went on below was but a 
pantomine to them, played by tiny, fore- 
shortened dwarfs. 

To the foreigners in the crowd the ab- 
sence of any guard or escort of soldiers 
near the President, or of soldiers of any 
sort, was probably the most peculiar feat- 
ure of the scene. In no other country 

155 



THE INAUGURATION 

would the head of the nation, whether he 
rule by inheritance or is elected to power, 
stand on such an occasion so close to the 
people without a military escort. The 
President of France does not even go to 
the races at Longchamps without an es- 
cort of soldiers. But the President of the 
United States is always unattended, and 
soldiers could not add to the dignity of 
his office. When he rode in state, later 
in the day, from the Capitol to the White 
House, he was surrounded by cavalry, 
who were, however, part of and in keeping 
with the procession. But when the Presi- 
dent takes the oath of office before the 
people, and delivers his inaugural address, 
there is not a single man in uniform to 
stand between him and his fellow-country- 
men, crowded together so close to him 
that by bending forward he could touch 
them with his hand. 

The spectacle, as it was presented to the 
people on the stand, was more brilliant 

than that seen by those on the ground. 

156 



THE INAUGURATION 

The stand overlooked a crowd of men, 
among whom were many women. It was 
a well - dressed crowd and well-behaved, 
but by no means a great crowd : at a foot- 
ball match on Thanksgiving Day in New 
York, three times as many people are 
gathered together. But it spread away 
from the stand in an unbroken mass for 
about a hundred yards, and stretched even 
farther to the right and left. On the out- 
skirts people came and stood for a moment 
and walked away again, moving in and 
out among the trees of the Capitol grounds 
freely, and without police supervision or 
interference ; bicyclers dismounted and 
looked across the heads of the mass for a 
few minutes, and then mounted and rode 
away. There were no tickets of admission to 
this open space. The man with the broad- 
est shoulders, or the woman who came first, 
stood as near to the President as any one 
on the platform, and heard him as easily 
as though they were conversing together 
in the same room. From the centre of 

157 



THE INAUGURATION 

the crowd, rising like the judges' stands 
at a race - meeting, were three roughly 
made shanties, from which cameras pho- 
tographed the actors on the platform at 
the rate of several thousands of exposures 
a minute, which photographs were a few 
days later to reproduce the scene from the 
stage of a dozen different theatres all over 
the United States. 

Three or four troops of the United 
States cavalry, and two troops of the 
smart cavalry from Cleveland, were drawn 
up at the edge of the crowd, and the shin- 
ing coats of the horses, and the tossing 
plumes in the helmets, and the yellow- 
topped busbies, made a brilliant bit of col- 
or under the trees. Back of all was the 
front of the new Congressional Library, 
trying not to look like the facade of the 
Paris Opera-House, with its gilded dome 
flashing in the warm sunshine. 

The family and friends of the President, 
who were so numerous that it seemed as 

though the entire town of Canton had 

158 



THE INAUGURATION 

moved down upon Washington, took their 
places around the dais, and the crowd 
cheered Major McKinley's wife and Major 
McKinleys mother. And the ladies smiled 
and bowed, and appeared supremely happy 
and content, as they looked down upon 
the faces in the crowd, which had turned 
a queer ghastly white in the bright sun- 
light, and appeared, as they were all raised 
simultaneously, like a carpet of human 
heads. 

The procession, as it came from the 
Senate-Chamber, was not as effective as 
it might have been, for it came by jerks 
and starts, with long spaces in between, 
and then in groups, the members of which 
crowded on each other's heels. Senators 
and Representatives, who had lagged be- 
hind, in their anxiety to catch up with the 
procession, walked across the benches, 
stepping from one to another as boys race 
each other to the place in the front row of 
the top gallery. The crowd below cheer- 
ed mightily when it saw the President 

'59 



THE INAUGURATION 

and President-elect, and Major McKinley 
walked out on the dais, and bowed bare- 
headed many times, while Mr. Cleveland, 
who throughout the day had left the cen- 
tre of the stage entirely to his friend, 
gazed about him at the swaying crowd, 
and perhaps remembered two other in- 
augural addresses, which he had delivered 
to much the same crowd from the same 
platform. 

The people were not kept waiting long, 
for the ceremony that makes a President 
lasts less than six minutes, while six hours 
are required to fasten the crown upon the 
Czar of Russia and to place the sceptre in 
his hand. One stone in that sceptre is 
worth one million of dollars, the crown 
three millions, and all the rulers of Europe, 
or their representatives, and great generals 
and statesmen, surround the Emperor while 
he takes the oath of office in the chapel of 
the gilded walls and jewelled pillars. And 
outside seventy thousand soldiers guard his 

safety. The President of the United States 

1 60 



THE INAUGURATION 

last March took his oath of office on a 
Bible which had been given him by the col- 
ored congregation of a Methodist church, 
with the sunshine on his head in place of 
a crown, with his mother and wife sitting 
near him on yellow kitchen chairs, and 
his only sceptre w r as the type-written ad- 
dress bulging from the pocket of his frock- 
coat. 

The little Chief Justice in his vast silken 
robe took the Bible which the clerk of the 
Senate handed to him and held it open 
before the President-elect, and the Presi- 
dent, who was in a moment to be the ex- 
President, stood up beside them, with his 
hat in his hand and his head bared to the 
spring breeze, and turned and looked down 
kindly at the people massed below. 

The people saw three men dressed 
plainly in black, one of them grave and 
judicial, another pale and earnest, and the 
third looking out across the mob unmoved 
and content. The noise and movement 
among the people were stilled for a mo- 

L i6r 



THE INAUGURATION 

ment as the voice of the Chief Justice re- 
cited the oath of office. As he spoke, it 
was as though he had pronounced an in- 
cantation, for, although the three figures 
remained as they were, so far as the people 
could see, a great transformation which 
the people could not see passed over the 
whole of the land, and its influence pene- 
trated to the furthermost corners of the 
earth. There came a new face at the 
door and a new step on the floor, and 
men who had thoughts above office, men 
who held office, and men who hoped to 
hold office recognized the change that 
had come. It came to the postmaster of 
the fourth class buried in the snows near 
British Columbia, to the ambassador to 
the Court of St. James, to the inspector 
of customs where the Rio Grande cuts 
Mexico from the alkali plains and chap- 
arral of Texas, to the gauger on the coral 
reef of Key West, to the revenue - officer 
among the moonshiners on Smoky Moun- 
tain, to American consuls in Europe, in 

162 



THE INAUGURATION 

South America, in Asia, in the South Pa- 
cific isles. Little men who had been made 
cabinet ministers became little men again, 
and dwindled and sank into oblivion ; other 
little men grew suddenly into big men, 
until the name and fame of them filled 
the land ; mills that had been closed down 
sprang into usefulness ; in other mills 
wheels ceased to turn and furnace fires 
grew cold ; the lakes of Nicaragua moved 
as though a hand had stirred the waters, 
and began to flow from ocean to ocean 
and to cut a continent in two; stocks rose 
and fell ; ministers of foreign affairs in all 
parts of the world planned new treaties and 
new tariffs ; a newspaper correspondent 
in a calaboose in Cuba saw the jail doors 
swing open and the Spanish comandantc 
beckon him out ; and the boy orator 
of the Platte, who had been given the 
votes of nearly seven million citizens, 
heard the door of the White House 
close in his face and shut him out for- 
ever. 

163 



THE INAUGURATION 

A government had changed hands with 
the quietness and dignity of the voice 
of the Chief Justice itself, and as Major 
McKinley bent to kiss the open Bible 
he became the executive head of the gov- 
ernment of the United States and G ro- 
ver Cleveland one of the many millions 
of American citizens he had sworn to 
protect. 

A few foolish people attended the inau- 
guration exercises and went away disap- 
pointed. This was not because the exer- 
cises were not of interest, but for the 
reason that the visitors saw them from the 
wrong point of view. They apparently 
expected to find in the inauguration of the 
President of a republic the same glitter 
and display that they had witnessed in state 
ceremonies in Europe. And by looking 
for pomp and rigid etiquette and official- 
ism they missed the whole significance of 
the inauguratian, which is not intended to 
glorify any one man, but is a national 

celebration, in which every citizen has a 

164 



THE INAUGURATION 

share — a sort of family gathering, where 
all the members of the clan, from the resi- 
dents of the thirteen original States to 
those of that State which has put the lat- 
est star in the flag, are brought together 
to rejoice over a victory and to make the 
best of a defeat. There is no such cel- 
ebration in any other country, and it is 
surely much better to enjoy it as some- 
thing unique in its way and distinctly our 
own, than to compare some of its features 
with like features of coronations and royal 
weddings abroad, in which certain ruling 
families glorify themselves and the people 
pay the bill. Why should we go out of 
our way to compare cricket in America 
with cricket as it is played on its native 
turf in England when we have a national 
game of our own which we play better than 
any one else ? 

There was an effort made before the 
inauguration by certain anarchistic news- 
papers in New York to make it appear 

that the managers of ceremonies at Wash- 

165 



THE INAUGURATION 

ington were aping the extravagant and 
ostentatious festivities of a monarchy, and 
it was pointed out with indignation that 
the inauguration would probably cost a 
half-million of dollars, of which the govern- 
ment would pay the larger part, and com- 
mittees and private subscribers would make 
up the rest. This estimate looks rather 
small when it is remembered that at the 
coronation of the Czar the sum spent on 
ten sets of harness used in the procession 
alone amounted to eighty thousand dollars, 
which is more than the actual cost of the 
entire inaugural exercises. So it can be 
seen that the laurels of our foreign friends, 
in this respect at least, are as yet quite safe 
from us. It is impossible to compare the 
inauguration with state celebrations abroad, 
because the whole spirit of the thing is dif- 
ferent. In Europe the people have little 
part in a state function except as specta- 
tors. They pay taxes to support a royal 
family and a standing army, and when a 
part of the royal family or a part of the 

166 



THE INAUGURATION 

army goes out on parade the people line 
the sidewalks and look on. 

In the inaugural procession the people 
themselves are the performers ; the rulers 
for the time being are of their own choos- 
ing ; and the people not only march in the 
parade, but they accomplish the somewhat 
difficult feat of standing on the sidewalks 
and watching themselves as they do it. 
There is all the difference between the two 
that there is between an amateur perform- 
ance in which every one in the audience 
knows every one on the stage, and has 
helped to make the thing a success, and a 
professional performance where the spec- 
tators pay a high price to have some one 
else amuse them. 

Every man who had voted the straight 
Republican ticket, and every Democrat 
who had voted for Major McKinley be- 
cause he represented sound money, felt 
that his vote o*ave him a share in the in- 
auguration, and that he had as good a 

right to celebrate the event as Mr. Mark 

167 



THE INAUGURATION 

Hanna himself; so the inaugural proces- 
sion and the inaugural ball which fol- 
lowed the swearing in of the new Presi- 
dent were distinctly representative of the 
whole people, and not especially of any 
party, and certainly not of any class. In 
the inaugural parade there were many 
magnificent displays by the military and 
some superb uniforms and excellent music, 
and distinguished men from all over the 
Union, but the feature of the parade was 
its democracy. It represented the people, 
and every condition of the people ; the 
people got it up, and the people carried it 
through to success, and their brothers and 
cousins stood by and applauded them. 
Parts of it were homely and parts of it 
were absurd, and some of it dragged and 
was tiresome ; but the part that bored one 
spectator was probably the very feature of 
the parade which the man standing next 
to him enjoyed the most. 

It was a great family outing, and it was 
interesting to hear the people of Washing- 

1 68 



THE INAUGURATION 

ton — many of whom do not know that 
there is any cultivated land lying beyond 
the shadow of the Washington monu- 
ment — cheering their fellow-countrymen 
from the far West and North, and to hear 
the bands playing " Dixie " and " My 
Maryland," which, had they been whistled 
in the streets of Washington some years 
before, would have brought out a riot in- 
stead of cheers. It was interesting also to 
see the white folks applauding the colored 
troops, and the old G. A. R. veteran who 
would not have had his lost arm back 
again on that day for several pensions, and 
to see the ambassador to France march- 
ing in the same column with the men 
against whom he had fought at Grants 
side. 

It was a great pity that more Americans 
could not have seen the bluejackets from 
the ships of war rolling and swaggering 
down Pennsylvania Avenue, which is the 
finest boulevard for such a procession that 

this country affords, and the engineers with 

169 



THE INAUGURATION 

their red capes, the cavalry with their 
yellow plumes and two thousand sabres 
flashing in the sunlight, and the bicycle 
corps creeping and balancing at a snail's 
pace. 

Next to the bluejackets, who are al- 
ways first in the hearts of their country- 
men, the light -blue uniforms and red 
capes of the engineers probably pleased 
the people best. They were all good and 
splendid in their own way, whether it was 
the rows on rows of infantry with their 
white facings, or the gauntlets and plumes 
of the cavalry, or the shining guns of the 
artillery crawling disjointedly like great 
iron spiders over the smooth asphalt. 

There was a foreign touch and a sug- 
gestion of Europe in the jackets of Troop 
A of Cleveland on their magnificent black 
horses, in the brass-spiked helmets of the 
Essex troop, and in the new, light-blue 
uniforms of the squad from Troop A of 
New York, who looked even handsomer 

than when they wore the service uniform. 

170 



THE INAUGURATION 

These are all militiamen, but thev are 
rough riders and trick riders, and can 
clear a street during a riot or sit their 
horses and dodge coupling-pins with the 
sang-froid and coolness of real veterans. 

There was one cavalry troop that was 
missed at the inauguration which should 
have been there, and, because of its tra- 
ditions, should always be the escort of 
the incoming President. The First City 
Troop of Philadelphia took part in the 
war of the Revolution, and in every war 
in which this country has been engaged. 
It is a small body, but it sent eighty offi- 
cers in command of cavalry regiments 
into the civil war. This troop acted as 
the escort of General Washington when 
he was President, and as the body-guard of 
almost every other new President. Gen- 
eral Harrison, however, broke the prece- 
dent, and preferred to have some of the 
members of his old regiment act as his 
body-guard. Major McKinley followed his 

example. The next President may like 

171 



THE INAUGURATION 

to have his bicycle club escort him. The 
action of General Harrison was no doubt 
pleasant for the Grand Army pensioners 
and his personal friends of the old regi- 
ment, but it is a question whether the 
people would not have preferred the record 
and the magnificence of the City Troop, 
who may be considered to have inherited 
their right to act as the escort of the 
President. 

When the government, as represented 
by the soldiers and the bluejackets, had 
inspired the spectators with pride and 
patriotism, the people themselves, as rep- 
resented by the militia and the Governors 
of the different States and political or- 
ganizations, fell into line behind them, 
and showed how well they could march, 
and claimed their share of the public 
triumph and the public applause. Some 
of the militia regiments marched as well 
as the regulars, or better, and the naval 
cadets from New Jersey, Maryland, and 

Rhode Island would have passed inspec- 

172 



THE INAUGURATION 

tion as ' v apprentices " for a real ship of 
war. There were many different kinds 
of uniform, and the men who wore them 
came from such great distances that their 
presence in Washington brought home 
the fact of how far-reaching is the sway 
of the republic, and how broad its terri- 
tory. There were the Hemming Guards, 
Texas volunteers from Gainesville, Texas, 
who won their uniforms only last July by 
scoring 977 at the State encampment, and 
who appeared in them at the inaugura- 
tion. And near these new soldiers from 
the largest State, was what is perhaps the 
oldest organization, from the smallest State, 
the Newport Artillery, which antedates 
the Union, and exists under a charter 
from King George II. in 1739, when Eng- 
land declared war on Spain — a charter 
which was ratified in 1782 by the Rhode 
Island General Assembly. There was also 
the Fifth Regiment of Maryland, which 
has a reputation almost as great as that of 
the New York Seventh, and there was the 

173 



THE INAUGURATION 

Seventy-first of that city, a body which 
has its nucleus in the American Rifles ; 
there was the order of the Old Guard 
from the modern city of Chicago, but 
which is composed of descendants of men 
who fought in the Indian wars and French 
wars, and in the wars of the Revolution 
and of 1812; and a few members of the 
Medal of Honor Legion, to each of whom 
Congress had voted a medal for bravery on 
the field of battle. There were, too, the 
Shenandoah Valley Patriotic League, from 
Virginia, formed of ex-Confederate soldiers 
and their sons, with the motto, " There 
should be no North, no South, no East, no 
West, but a common country," and a dele- 
gation from the Harmony Pre- Legion of 
Philadelphia, a relic of the old Harmony 
fire company, in helmets and red shirts ; 
and there was the Republican Glee Club 
of Columbus, which has sung patriotic 
songs in every national campaign since that 
of Grant and Greeley. 

These are but a few of the organizations 

174 



THE INAUGURATION 

that passed up Pennsylvania Avenue in 
the brilliant afternoon sunshine between 
curtains of flags, with brass bands, every 
one of them playing " El Capitan" or the 
" Washington Post March." These are 
but a few, but they illustrate the varied 
nature of the procession. They repre- 
sented, as it were, the whole people. 

There was one feature of the parade 
which would have puzzled the foreigner 
had he understood its significance, and 
which was a commentary on our political 
system. It was the number of clubs and 
organizations which bore the name and 
existed for the personal and selfish aggran- 
dizement of some one man, and that man 
seldom a great man or a wise man or a 
man of whom many people outside of his 
own city had ever heard. Every one must 
recognize the importance of political organ- 
izations ; and when they are called the 
Junior Political Club of the Fourth Ward, 
or the Unconditional Republican Club 
of Albany, or the First Voters' Repub- 

175 



THE INAUGURATION 



lican League of Detroit, their object for 
existing is obvious, and may be approved 
by every one, be he a Democrat, a mug- 
wump, or a Populist. But when three 
hundred men march under a banner bear- 
ing the name and features of " Matt" Quay 
or " Tom " Piatt or " Dave " Martin, the 
spectator is reminded not of a republic 
where every citizen is supposed to vote 
freely and as his conscience dictates, but of 
the feudal clays, and of the baron and his 
serfs and retainers. It is easy to under- 
stand why the political boss exists, from the 
point of view of the boss, or why a slave- 
holder should be willing to hold slaves, but 
it is difficult to understand why the slaves 
themselves should rejoice in their degrada- 
tion and wish to publish it abroad. Any 
one might be proud to march in the ranks 
of an organization that bore the name of 
an American who had accomplished some- 
thing for his country, who had lived and 
died for a great truth, or who had repre- 
sented a noble idea. But why should men 

176 



THE INAUGURATION 

wear the collar of a boss where every one 
can see it ; and why should they, for fear 
that every one should not see it, hire a brass 
band to draw attention to the fact that they 
have it on ? These gentlemen who marched 
on Inauguration Day were, so the papers 
said, prominent business men, lawyers, and 
bankers. Many of them certainly looked 
as if they belonged to that class ; but if 
they were men of intelligence, why could 
they not see how undemocratic and how 
un-American they were in giving their con- 
sciences into the hands of one man ? One 
organization of nearly a thousand had for 
its motto, "We follow where Quigg leads." 
Now Mr. Quigg may be, probably is, a well- 
meaning young man, but why should a 
thousand men travel all the way to Wash- 
ington when representatives from every 
part of the Union are gathered together 
there, and proclaim to them that they are 
no longer freeborn American citizens with 
a sacred right to vote as they please, but 

merely tools and heelers for " Quigg"? 

M 177 



THE INAUGURATION 

These are the very same Americans who 
boast of their independence in the smoking- 
room of ocean steamers and in the railway 
carriages of Continental railroads, forget- 
ting that there are few people in Europe 
who are ruled by such a boss as this or 
that one designated on these banners. If 
they are so ruled they are ashamed of the 
fact, and do not paint his face on a silk 
banner as though he were a saint, and 
bow down to it, or carry a gilded spear 
with a pennant bearing his name at its 
point. 

"Who," the poor king -ridden visitor 
might have asked at Washington, as the 
clubs went marching by with these pen- 
nants — "who is Kurtz, or Quigg, or 
Quay ?" 

Who indeed ! 

But how much more important it would 
be to know who the men are who glorify 
them, and who have sunk their indepen- 
dence so far that, for the chance of getting 

a window in a post-office, or a policeman's 

178 



THE INAUGURATION 

uniform, they will march through the dirty 
streets under their banners. 

However, these men formed but a small 
part of this extremely democratic proces- 
sion, and their presence in it was soon for- 
gotten. It was the soldiers and the blue- 
jackets, the militia and the naval reserve, 
that the spectators remembered, the men 
who carry a United States flag, and not a 
banner bearing a man's portrait, and who 
serve unselfishly their State and country, 
and are willing to follow their leaders to 
more dangerous places than the club-room 
and the polling-booth. 

When the vanguard of the procession 
reached the White House, Mr. Cleveland, 
who had accompanied the President on 
his return journey from the Capitol, but 
seated now on his left instead of on his 
right, entered the White House perhaps 
for the last time, and left it again imme- 
diately. 

No incident of the inauguration exer- 
cises is so significant or dramatic as this 

179 



THE INAUGURATION 

abrupt departure into private life of the 
ex-President. There is no farewell speech 
for him to make, no post-mortem address 
such as the one the Vice - President de- 
livers. The ex- President's works must 
speak for him, and he departs in silence 
and unattended. 

On this last occasion, while the new 
President walked out to the reviewing- 
stand in front of the White House grounds, 
and the spectators on the grandstand op- 
posite rose to cheer him, Mr. Cleveland 
stepped into his carriage at a side door, 
and, leaving the house he had occupied for 
eight of the best years of his life, drove 
away with no more important business be- 
fore him than a few days' fishing. The 
blare of the bands and the cheers for 
his successor in office followed him, but 
the faces of the people were turned away ; 
they were greeting the new and rising 
sun ; and, freed from the terrible responsi- 
bilities of office, from abuse and criticism, 
and from the glare that falls even more 

iSo 




REVIEWING THE PROCESSION FROM THE STAND IN FRONT OF 
THE WHITE HOUSE 



THE INAUGURATION 

impudently upon the President of a re- 
public than upon a throne, Mr. Cleveland 
was driven, a free man once again, to the 
Seventh Street wharf, where a tender with 
steam up was awaiting his coming. Two 
of his friends hurried him on board, the 
ropes were cast off, the captain jingled his 
bell into the depths of the engine-room, 
and the ex - President glided peacefully 
down the Potomac, sorting out his rods 
and lines on the deck, and intent only 
upon the holiday before him. 

Our local historians and political writ- 
ers, John Bach McMaster, Woodrow Wil- 
son, and Albert Shaw, have already placed 
Mr. Cleveland high among the Presidents, 
and, as time wears on, and the grievances 
and disappointments which explain so 
much of the criticism that he has received 
shall have passed away, he will be remem- 
bered if only for the things he dared to 
leave undone. He will take his place in 
history as a man more hated and more 
respected than any of his immediate pre- 

181 



THE INAUGURATION 

decessors, and as one of the three great 
Presidents of America. 

Before the two men had parted at the 
White House steps, Mrs. Cleveland re- 
ceived Mrs. McKinley on her return from 
the Capitol, and put a bunch of flowers 
in her hand, and led her to the luncheon 
she had prepared for her and her guests, 
and then slipped away as quietly as her 
husband, to make ready the new home 
they have chosen in the pretty old town 
of Princeton. And while the new first 
lady of the land was receiving the greet- 
ings from the populace in front of the 
White House, its late mistress was speed- 
ing away through the late afternoon twi- 
light, her car swamped with the flowers 
that had come to her from every part of 
the United States, and carrying w 7 ith her 
into her new life in her new home the best 
wishes of a great nation. 

The inaugural ball was held in the 
Pension Building; it was as democratic 

in its way as was the parade, and it was 

182 



THE INAUGURATION 

as successful. Any one who paid five 
dollars was welcome, and no one after he 
had arrived made himself unwelcome. That 
is much more than can be said of many 
other public balls given for charity or for 
the benefit of some organization, and to 
which access is more difficult. The most 
successful feature of the ball was perhaps 
the decoration of the building, the original 
character of which — if anything connected 
with our pension system can be said to 
have a character — was completely hidden 
by the most charming and graceful ar- 
rangement of white and yellow draperies 
and flowering yellow plants and great 
green palms and palmettoes. This scheme 
of color, of white and yellow with dark 
green, was continued over the entire ball- 
room. 

The Pension Building is arranged 
around a great court, which is overhung 
with galleries and has a high roof 1 20 feet 
from the tiled floor. This court is divided 
into smaller courts by rows of immense 

183 



THE INAUGURATION 

pillars. On the night of the ball the roof 
over each of the three sections was hidden 
by streamers of white challis as wide as 
the sails of a ship, which were caught up 
together in the centre by bunches of white 
electric lights, and fell from them in billowy 
folds to meet and wind about the pillars. 
To one who looked up at the ceiling it 
appeared as though he were standing in a 
great white tent rather than in a house of 
stone and iron, and the effect of the elec- 
tric lights against the soft white folds of the 
challis was that of yellow diamonds shin- 
ing through spun silver. The huge pillars 
were treated to resemble onyx, and were 
built high about the base with flowering 
plants, all of yellow — yellow jonquils, yel- 
low tulips, and acacias. Along the galleries 
and across the white ceiling crept long del- 
icate vines of ivy, and hidden among the 
sturdier palms and palmettoes on the floor 
were hundreds of tiny electric globes glow- 
ing like red and green fire -flies. There 

were many uniforms in the crush, and more 

184 



THE INAUGURATION 

gold lace than this country has probably 
ever seen gathered into one place before ; 
and there were some fine gowns, and some 
gowns which were peculiar. A number of 
the women w T ore black silk frocks or their 
street dress, but they made up for the 
simplicity of these by the brilliancy of the 
silk badges with which they had covered 
themselves from shoulder to shoulder. The 
shoulders of a few other women were their 
most conspicuous feature, and they were, 
in consequence, objects of the most earnest 
interest to many grave-eyed strangers from 
the far interior, in frock-coats and white 
satin ties, who had read about such things 
in the papers, but who disbelieved in them 
as they disbelieved in the existence of 
bunco-steerers. One stranger had brought 
his little child with him, who went to sleep 
on his shoulder, and he carried her there 
all the evening while he pushed his way 
through the crowd, serious and solemn- 
eyed, and unconscious that he was in any 
way conspicuous. 

18s 



THE INAUGURATION 

Women of great social position, as it is 
meted out to them in the columns of the 
Sunday papers, passed in the crowd un- 
recognized and unobserved, while other 
women, through a somewhat novel arrange- 
ment of fur capes on a silk shirt-waist, or 
a gown covered with silk flowers, received 
the respectful attention which they de- 
served. It was the people's ball, and the 
manners of the people, as contrasted with 
those of that same " society " which is 
chronicled in the papers, were much the 
finer of the two. They were not afraid to 
enjoy themselves, and they were genial 
and unaffected and genuinely polite, in- 
troducing all their friends to all of their 
other friends whenever they met, while the 
men seldom gave an arm to less than three 
of the ladies in their care. 

There were ambassadors and their wives; 
Governors of States surrounded by aides 
to the number of a dozen or more, glitter- 
ing with gold braids and flashing scab- 
bards ; there were beautiful women from 

186 



THE INAUGURATION 

the South and West, and women from the 
sister republics of South America, with 
strange little dark-skinned husbands ; and 
there were countless numbers of well- 
dressed women whose clothes came from 
Europe, and who were anxious to go back 
to Europe again as the wives of newly ap- 
pointed ministers or secretaries of legation, 
and who followed the passing of Mark 
Hanna with anxious and agitated eyes. 

Just before the President and Mrs. Mc- 
Kinley entered the ballroom the commit- 
teemen pushed their way through the 
crowd and asked the men standing near- 
est to them to join hands with the men 
next them, and in this way they formed two 
long lines of young men who never had 
met before, who would probably never meet 
again, and who had no interest in common 
except their anxiety that the ball should 
pass off well. Through these lines of vol- 
unteers the President and his wife passed, 
followed by the members of his cabinet, 

and the people bowed and smiled and 

187 



THE INAUGURATION 

beamed upon them much as the crowd in a 
church does when the bride and the groom 
come back from the altar up the aisle. In 
a foreign country there would have been 
soldiers or policemen to push the crowd 
back and to clear the way for the ruler of 
the nation. How much pleasanter it was 
to have the men in the crowd act as their 
own police and look after their own Presi- 
dent themselves! 

The casual picking up of these young 
men and pressing them into this particular 
service was typical of all of the inaugu- 
ration ceremonies. It shows where our 
celebration differed from that other great 
ceremonial which took place last year at 
Moscow. 

The coronation ceremony, parade, and 
ball w r ere state ceremonials, to pay for which 
the people were taxed forty millions of dol- 
lars, and at which their part was to stand 
behind two rows of soldiers and look at 
fireworks in the sky. 

The inauguration exercises, the parade, 

188 



THE INAUGURATION 

and the ball were all a part of a celebration 
of the victory of honesty and of principle 
for the American people, and at these cer- 
emonies the people themselves were the 
chief actors. 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

The Illustrations in this Article are Reproductions from Photographs 
taken by Mr. Davis 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 



THE strategic position of the Greek 
and Turkish armies in the late cam- 
paign was but little more complicated than 
the strategic position of two football teams 
when they are lined up for a scrimmage. 
When the game began, the Greeks had 
possession of the ball, and they rushed it 
into Turkish territory, where they lost it 
almost immediately on a fumble, and after 
that the Turks drove them rapidly down 
the field, going around their ends and 
breaking through their centre very much 
as they pleased. 

The Greeks were outnumbered three to 
one, but there are many people who think 
that they would have run away even had 
the number of men on both sides been 

N 193 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

equal. There is, however, no way of prov- 
ing that they would have done this, while 
it can be proved that they were outnum- 
bered, and were nearly always, for that rea- 
son, attacked as strongly on the flank as 
in the front. This fact should be placed 
to their credit side in summing up their 
strange conduct. If an eleven from Prince- 
ton played three elevens from Yale at the 
same time, one can see that the game 
would hardly be interesting; and to carry 
out the simile still further, and then to drop 
it, it was as though this Princeton eleven 
was untrained, and had no knowledge of 
tricks nor of team-play, and absolutely no 
regard for its captain as a captain. 

It is a question whether the chief trouble 
with the Greeks is not that they are too 
democratic to make good soldiers, and too 
independent to submit to being led by any 
one from either the council-chamber or the 
field. Perhaps the most perfect example 
of pure democracy that exists anywhere in 

the world is found among the Greeks to- 

194 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

day — a state of equality the like of which 
is not to be found with us nor in the re- 
public of France. Each Greek thinks and 
acts independently, and respects his neigh- 
bor's opinion just as long as his neighbor 
agrees with him. The king sits in cafes 
and chats with his subjects, and they buy 
the wine he sells and the asparagus he 
grows, and in return he purchases their 
mutton. My courier, who was a hotel 
runner, used to shake hands with the Min- 
ister of War and the Minister of the In- 
terior, and they called him by his first 
name and seemed very glad to meet him. 
Newsboys in Athens argued together as to 
what the concert of the Powers might do 
next, and private soldiers travelled first- 
class, and discussed the war with their 
officers during the journey in the most 
affable and friendly manner. The country 
was like a huge debating society. When 
these men were called out to act as sol- 
diers, almost every private had his own 
idea as to how the war should be con- 

195 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

ducted. He had a map of the country in 
his canvas bag, and as his idea not infre- 
quently clashed with the ideas of his su- 
periors, there were occasional moments of 
confusion. The fact that his officers wore 
a few more stars on their collars than he 
did, and were called colonel or major, did 
not impress him in the least. He regard- 
ed such distinctions as mere descriptive 
phrases, intended to designate one man 
from another, just as streets are named 
differently in order to distinguish them, 
and he continued to act and to think for 
himself, as had been his habit. On the 
march to Domokos three privates argued 
with a major, who was old enough to have 
been the father of all of them, as to whether 
or not they should leave the camp to fill 
their canteens. The major stamped his 
feet and threw his hands above his head 
and expostulated frantically, and they 
soothed him and tried to persuade him by 
various arguments that he was unreason- 
able. They treated him respectfully, prob- 

196 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

ably on account of his years, but they 
showed him clearly that they considered 
his premises erroneous and his position 
illogical. 

It may be argued that discipline is not 
the most essential quality in a soldier, and 
that sometimes naturally born fighting-men, 
with the advantage of greater numbers, can 
defeat trained veterans. But the Greeks 
were neither born fighters nor trained sol- 
diers. 

In Greece^every soldier was a little army 
by himself, and when he decided that it 
was time to turn and run, there was no 
familiar elbow-touch to remind him that 
he was not alone. He was sure he was 
just as intelligent as any one else, and 
quite as able to tell when the critical mo- 
ment had arrived, and so, naturally, it ar- 
rived very often. 

This does not mean that all the Greeks 
were cowards. That would be an exceed- 
ingly absurd thing to suggest. Some of 
them, officers and men alike, showed ad- 

197 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

mirable calmness and courage, and an ex- 
cellent knowledge of what they had to do. 
But a great many of them knew little of 
campaigning, and nothing of fighting. A 
boy in the States who has camped out for 
one summer in the Adirondacks would 
have known better how to care for the 
Greek soldiers in the field than did half of 
their officers, who had learned what they 
knew of war around the cafes in Athens. 
I was with one regiment in which almost 
every man started for the field in perfect- 
ly new shoes. The result was that within 
five hours or sooner half of them were 
walking barefoot; and when we came to the 
first water-tank these men ran ahead and 
stuck their bleeding feet into the cool 
water, and stamped it full of mud, and 
made it quite impossible for any of their 
comrades to fill their thirsty canteens. 
Whenever we came to water, instead of 
holding the men back and sending a de- 
tail on ahead to guard the well, and then 

calling up a few men from each company 

198 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

to fill the canteens for the majority, there 
was always a stampede of this sort, and 
the water was wasted and much time lost. 
These are little things, but they illustrate 
as well as more important blunders how 
ignorantly the men were handled. 

Too many of the Greeks, also, went 
forth to war with a most exaggerated idea 
of the ease with which a Turkish regiment 
can be slaughtered or made to run away; 
and when they found that very few Turks 
were killed, and that none of them ran 
away, the surprise at the discovery quite 
upset them, and they became panic-strick- 
en, and there was the rout to Larissa in 
consequence. The rout to Larissa was as 
actual a disaster for the Greeks as bad 
ammunition would have been, or an epi- 
demic of fever among the troops. We 
can remember how the fire in the Charity 
Bazaar in Paris affected the Parisians for 
weeks after it had occurred, and made 
them fearful of entering public places of 

amusement, and that the size of audiences 

i 99 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

on account of it suffered all over the 
world. A similar terror lay back in the 
mind of each Greek soldier. He felt that 
what one Greek had done he might do. 
He remembered how his comrades had 
hurled their arms away from them, how 
they rode each other down, and how their 
own artillery left a line of dead and wound- 
ed Greeks behind it in its flight. Instead 
of assuring himself, in lack of any evidence 
to the contrary, that he was going to stand 
and fall in his own footprints, he was 
haunted with doubts of his courage. "Am 
I going to run, as they did at Larissa ?" he 
asked himself repeatedly, and he was con- 
sidering to what point he could retreat, in- 
stead of observing the spot in the land- 
scape to which he would advance. He 
kept his fingers feeling and probing at the 
pulse of his courage, instead of pressing 
them on the hammer of his rifle. If it be 
possible to inspire men to deeds of bravery 
by calling upon them to remember Mar- 
athon or Waterloo or the Alamo, it is 

200 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

easy to understand that the word Larissa, 
even though it were whispered by a camp 
fire at midnight, might produce an oppo- 
site result. 

Many people believe that a true under- 
standing of the Greek campaign depends 
upon an acquaintance with the letters 
which passed between the King and his 
royal relatives in the courts of Europe. 
Without them no one can guess how 
much the secret orders he may or may 
not have received from the Powers served 
to influence the conduct of the war. The 
Greek soldiers, at one time, at least, were 
undoubtedly of the opinion that they had 
been deceived and betrayed by the King at 
the demands of the Powers, and that their 
commander-in-chief, the Crown-Prince, had 
received orders not to give battle, but to 
retreat continually. This feeling was as 
strong among the people in the towns and 
cities as it was among the soldiers in the 
fields, and portraits and photographs of 
the royal family were defaced and thrown 

201 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

out into the street, and in Athens a mob 
led by a Deputy marched upon the palace 
to assassinate the King, after having helped 
itself to arms and ammunition in the dif- 
ferent gun-shops. The mob would proba- 
bly have done nothing to the King, except 
to frighten him a little, and only desired 
to make a demonstration, and, as a matter 
of history, it did not even see him. For 
when the Deputy, at the threshold of the 
palace, demanded to be led at once into 
the presence of his Majesty, a nervous 
aide-de-camp replied through the half-open 
door that his Majesty did not receive on 
that day. And the Deputy, recognizing 
the fact that it is impossible to kill a man 
if he is not at home, postponed the idea of 
assassination, and explained to the blood- 
thirsty mob that for purposes of regicide 
it had chosen an inconvenient time. His 
Majesty's days for being killed were prob- 
ably Tuesdays and Thursdays, between 
four and seven. 

King George was unfortunate in having 

202 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

been carried beyond his depth by a people 
who seem as easily moved as those of a 
Spanish-American republic, and the worst 
they say of him is that he is a weak man, 
and one who plays the part of king badly. 
Had he told the people stoutly that they 
were utterly unprepared for war — a fact 
which no one knew better than himself — 
they could not, when they received the 
thrashing which he knew must come, have 
blamed him for not having warned them 
like a true friend. But be did not do that. 
He said, from the balcony of the palace, 
that, if war should come, he himself would 
lead them into Thessaly ; and then, by de- 
laying the declaration of war, he allowed 
the Turkish forces sufficient time in which 
to take up excellent positions. Even after 
the war began he made no use whatsoever 
of the navy. As the Turks had no navy 
worth considering, the Greek war-ships in 
comparison formed the most important 
part of their war equipment. And had their 

government, or the Powers, allowed them to 

203 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

do so, the Greek vessels might have seized 
any number of little Turkish islands and 
garrisoned them until peace was declared. 
These would have been of great value to 
Greece later, when the terms of peace were 
being drawn up and indemnities were be- 
ing discussed and demanded. But as it 
was, except for the siege of Prevesa, no one 
heard of the Greek navy from the begin- 
ning of the war to its end. 

It is difficult to arouse much sympathy 
for the royal family. People of unimagina- 
tive minds already suggest that kings and 
princes are but relics of the Middle Ages, 
and if the kings and princes who still sur- 
vive wish to give a reason for their place in 
the twentieth century they should at least 
show themselves to be men. A prince en- 
joys a very comfortable existence ; he is 
well paid to be ornamental and tactful, and 
not to interfere in affairs of state ; but oc- 
casionally there comes the time when he 
has to pay for what has gone before by 

showing that he is something apart from 

204 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

his subjects — that he is a prince among 
men. In the old days the Crown-Prince 
was not exempt from exposing himself in 
the fighting line. It is true he disguised a 
half-dozen other men in armor like his own, 
so that he had a seventh of a chance of 
escaping recognition. But there was that 
one chance out of seven that he would be 
the one set upon by the enemy, and that 
he would lose his kingdom by an arrow or 
a blow from a battle-axe. They led their 
subjects in those days ; they did not, at 
the first sign of a rebuff, desert them on a 
special train. 

That, unfortunately, was what the Crown- 
Prince Constantine did at Larissa. It was 
only right that, both as the heir-apparent 
and as commander-in-chief, he should have 
taken care to preserve his life. But he 
was too careful ; or, to be quite fair to him, 
it may have been that he was ill-advised 
by the young men on his staff. Still, his 
staff was of his own choosing. His chief- 

of-staff was a young man known as a lead- 

205 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

er of cotillions in Athens, and who, so I 
was repeatedly informed, has refused to 
fight nine duels in a country where that 
relic of barbarism is still recognized as an 
affair touching a man's honor. It was this 
youth who turned the Greek ladies out of 
a railroad carriage to make room for the 
Prince, and who helped to fill it with his 
Highness's linen and dressing-cases. It is 
pleasant to remember that one of the demo- 
cratic porters at the railroad station was 
so indignant at this that he knocked the 
aide-de-camp full length on the platform. 
One of the Greek papers, in describing the 
flight of the Crown-Prince, said, in an edi- 
torial, "We are happy to state that on the 
arrival of the train it was found that not 
one pocket-handkerchief belonging to the 
Prince was lost — and so the honor of 
Greece is saved." Another paper said, 
" Loues the peasant won the race from 
Marathon ; Constantine the Prince won 
the race from Larissa." 

" It is given to very few men to carry a 

206 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

line to a sinking ship or to place a flag 
upon the walls of Lucknow," and even less 
frequently than to other men is such a 
chance given to a crown-prince ; and when 
he fails to take the chance, the conspicu- 
ousness of his position makes his failure 
just so much the more terrible. When 
other men make mistakes they can begin 
a new life under a new flag and a new 
name at Buenos Ayres or Callao ; but a 
crown-prince cannot change his name nor 
his flag. Other men, who had no more 
lives to spare than has his Royal Highness, 
remained in the trenches ; indeed, many of 
them went there out of mere idle curiosity, 
to see a fight, to take photographs, or to 
pick up souvenirs from the field. And 
women, too, with little scissors and lancets 
dangling like trinkets from their chate- 
laines, and red crosses on their arms, stood 
where he did not stand. If he had only 
walked out and shown himself for a mo- 
ment, and spoken to the men and ques- 
tioned the officers, and then ridden away 

207 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

a^ain, he would have made himself the 
most popular man in Greece, and would 
have established his dynasty forever in 
that country. He did this at Pharsala, but 
then it was too late ; every one knew that 
when the whole country was calling him a 
coward, he would have to be brave the sec- 
ond time. And so Constantine must spend 
the rest of his life explaining his conduct, 
when he might have let one brave act speak 
for him. Nicholas, the other prince, who 
is a lieutenant in the artillery, was not 
seen near his battery during the fight be- 
fore the retreat to Larissa ; and as for that 
big, bluff, rollicking sea-dog, George, who 
is always being photographed in naval 
togs, with his cap cocked recklessly over 
one ear, he was never heard of from one 
end of the campaign to the other. It was 
generally reported that he had taken the 
navy on a voyage of exploration to the 
north pole. 

One night, on our way to Volo, an Aus- 
tralian correspondent, who was very much 

208 




ft n> 










V 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

of a democrat, and anything but a snob, 
was trying to explain and to justify the 
conduct of the Crown-Prince at Larissa. 
But he either found his audience unsym- 
pathetic or sceptical, for at last he laughed 
and shrugged his shoulders : " After all," 
he said, "it should mean something even 
to-day to be a prince." 

I first came up with the Greek soldiers 
at Actium, on the Gulf of Arta, where the 
artillery and the war-ships were shelling 
Prevesa. 

The Gulf of Arta has Greece on its one 
bank and Turkey on the other, and where 
it empties into the Adriatic, there is Pre- 
vesa on the Turkish side, and on the Greek 
side a solitary stone hut. Below it is the 
island of Santa Maura and a town of toy 
houses as old and black as Dutch-ovens 
and with overhanging, red - tiled roofs. 
Santa Maura lies below Corfu and above 
Cephalonia, and close to neither ; but those 
are the places nearest on the map that are 
displayed in type large enough to serve as 

o 209 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

an address. From the Greek bank Pre- 
vesa was only a wall of white ramparts 
shimmering in the sun, with tall poplars 
and pencil-like minarets pointing against 
the blue sky ; as seen from the other bank 
it was, so they said, a town filled with 
hungry people and wounded soldiers and 
shattered cannon. The siege of Prevesa 
began on the 18th of April, and the Greek 
officers on the war-ships continued the siege 
until the armistice. 

It was hard to believe that war existed 
in that part of Greece ; it was difficult to 
see how, with such a background, men 
could act a part so tragic ; for the scene 
was set for a pastoral play — perhaps for a 
comic opera. If Ireland is like an emer- 
ald, this part of Greece is like an opal ; for 
its colors are as fierce and brilliant as are 
those of the opal, and are hidden, as they 
are, with misty white clouds that soften 
and beautify them. Against the glaring 
blue sky are the snow-topped mountains, 
and below the snow -line green pasture- 

2IO 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

lands glowing with great blocks of purple 
furze and yellow buttercups and waving 
wheat, that changes when the wind blows, 
and is swayed about like waves of smoke. 
In the high grass are the light-blue flow- 
ers of the flax, on tall, bending stalks, and 
white flowers with hearts of yellow, and 
miles of scarlet poppies, and above them 
tall, dark poplars and the grayish -green 
olive-trees. The wind from the Adriatic 
and the Gulf of Arta sweeps over this burn- 
ing landscape in great, generous waves, 
cooling: the hot air and stirring the screen 
leaves and the high grass and the bending 
flowers with the strong, fresh breath of the 
sea. 

White clouds throw shadows over the 
whole as they sweep past or rest on the 
hills of gray stones, where the yellow sheep 
look, from the path below, like fat grains 
of corn spilled on a green billiard cloth. 
You may ride for miles through this fair 
country and see no moving thing but the 
herds of silken -haired goats and yellow 



211 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

sheep, and the shepherds leaning on their 
long rifles, and looking, in their tights and 
sleeveless cloaks and embroidered jackets, 
like young princes of the soil. 

It is hard to imagine men fighting fierce- 
ly and with bloodshot eyes in such a 
place ; and, as a matter of fact, no men 
were fighting there, except in a measured, 
leisurely, and well - bred way. Over in 
Thessaly, for all we know here, there was 
war, and all that war entails; but by the 
Arta the world went on much as it had be- 
fore — the sheep-bells tinkled from every 
hill-side, the soldiers picnicked under the 
shade of the trees, and the bombardment 
of Prevesa continued, with interruptions 
of a day at a time, and the answering 
guns of the Turks returned the compli- 
ment in an apologetic and desultory fash- 
ion. Sometimes it almost seemed — so bad 
was the aim of the Turkish soldiers — 
that they were uncertain as to whether 
or not they had loaded their pieces, and 
were pulling the lanyards in order to find 

212 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

out, being too lazy to open the breech and 
look. 

I rode out one day into the camp at 
Actium, where the solitary stone hut 
looked across on Prevesa, and Prevesa on 
the sea, and found a regiment of artillery 
camping out in the bushes, and two offi- 
cers and a cable - operator bivouacked in 
the hut. A merry sergeant explained that 
a correspondent had come all the way from 
America to describe their victories ; and 
the regiment gathered outside the stone 
hut and made comments and interrupted 
their officers and contradicted them, and 
the officers regarded the men kindly and 
with the most perfect good feeling. It was 
not the sort of discipline that obtains in 
other Continental armies, but it was proba- 
bly attributable to the scenery — no colonel 
could be a martinet under such a sky. 
The cable-operator played for us on a gui- 
tar, and the major sang second in a rich 
bass voice, and the colonel opened tinned 

cans of caviare and Danish butter, and the 

213 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

army watched us eat with serious and hos- 
pitable satisfaction. One man brought 
water, and another made chocolate, and a 
stern corporal ordered the soldiers away ; 
but they knew he was only jesting, and, 
after turning around, came back again, 
and bowed as one man, and removed their 
caps whenever we drank anybody's health. 
It reminded one of a camp of volunteers 
off for a week of sham-battles in the coun- 
try. When I started on my way again the 
colonel detailed an escort; and when I 
assured him there was no danger, he as- 
sured me in return that he was well aware 
of that, but that this was a "guard for 
honor." No man can resist a " guard for 
honor," and so part of the army detached 
itself and tramped off, picking berries as it 
marched, and stopping to help a shepherd 
lad " round up " a stray goat, or to watch two 
kids fighting for the supremacy of a ledge 
of rock. It is impossible to harbor evil 
thoughts, even of a Turk who is shelling 

your camp, after you have stood for a quar- 

214 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

ter of an hour watching two kids roll each 
other off a rock. The state of mind that 
follows the one destroys the possibility of 
your entertaining the state of mind that is 
necessary for the other. 

On the next day a company of the ioth 
Regiment of Infantry left Salagora for the 
Five Wells, where there was to be a great 
battle that afternoon. We were on Turkish 
soil now, but still the soldiers carried them- 
selves like boys off on a holiday, and, like 
boys, enjoyed it all the more because they 
were trespassing on forbidden ground. We 
all may have our own ideas as to how an 
armed force invades the territory of the 
enemy — the alertness with which the men 
watch for an ambush, the pickets thrown 
out in front, and the scowling faces of the 
inhabitants as the victors and invaders 
pass. Perhaps, to a vivid imagination, the 
situation suggests poisoned wells left be- 
hind as mementos, and spiked cannon 
abandoned by the road-side, and burning 

fields that mark the wake of the flying 

215 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

enemy. But we saw none of these things 
on that part of the frontier. It is true the 
inhabitants of Salagora had abandoned a 
few cannon, and (which seemed to cause 
more delight to the Greek soldiers) a post- 
office full of postal-cards, upon which they 
wrote messages to their friends at home, 
with the idea of posting them while on 
Turkish soil, and so making the Turkish 
government unwittingly forward these 
evidences of its own humiliation. The 
men sang as they marched, and marched 
as they pleased, and the country people 
that we met saluted them gravely by 
touching the forehead and breast. No 
one scowled at them, and they feared no 
ambush, but jogged along, strung out over 
a distance of a quarter of a mile, and only 
stopping when the Turkish guns, which 
were now behind us, fired across the gulf 
at a round fort on a hill in Greece, and a 
white puff of smoke drifted lazily after the 
ball to see where it had gone. The field 
birds, and the myriad of insect life, and the 



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WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

low chimes of the sheep-bells so filled the 
hot air with the sounds of peace that it 
was an effort to believe that the heavy 
rumble and thick upheaval of the air be- 
hind us came from hot-throated cannon. 
One suspected rather that some workmen 
were blasting in a neighboring quarry, and 
one looked ahead for the man with the red 
flag who should warn us of descending 
stones. The soldiers halted near mid-day 
at a Greek church— for almost all of those 
Turks who live on the shores of the Arta 
are Christians — and the old priest came 
out and kissed each of them on the cheek, 
and the conquering heroes knelt and kiss- 
ed his hand. Then there was more pic- 
nicking, and the men scattered over the 
church-yard, and some plucked and cooked 
the chickens they had brought with them, 
and others slept, stretched out on the 
tombstones, and others chatted amicably 
and volubly with the Turkish peasants, 
who had come, full of curiosity, from the 

fields to greet them. And after an hour 

217 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

we moved on again ; but before we left the 
village, a Turk ran ahead and lifted the 
glass from the front of the picture of the 
Saviour that hung under a great tree, and 
his friends the enemy broke ranks, and, 
with their caps in their hands and crossing 
themselves, knelt and kissed the picture 
that the Turk held out to them, and pray- 
ed that his brother Turks might not kill 
them a few hours later at the Five Wells. 
But we never saw the Five Wells ; for 
within an hour's ride from it we met 
peasants fleeing down the road, bent un- 
der their household goods, and with wild 
tales that the battle had already gone to 
the Turks, and that all the Greek troops 
were retreating on the city of Arta. And 
soon we came in sight of long lines of 
men crawling into the valley from all 
sides, and looking no larger than tin sol- 
diers against the high walls of the moun- 
tain. It was a leisurely withdrawal, and 
no one seemed to know the reason for it. 

A colonel, with his staff about him, shrug- 

218 



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WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

ged his shoulders when I rode up and 
asked why the battle we had marched so 
far to see had been postponed. The com- 
mander-in-chief had ordered him to return, 
he said, for what reason he knew not. 
" But I am coming back again," he added, 
cheerfully. 

The road to Arta was not wider than a 
two-wheeled ox-cart, and down it, for many 
hours, and until long after the stars began 
to show, poured and pressed an unbroken 
column of artillery and cavalry and infan- 
try, which latter carried their guns as they 
chose and walked in no order. Men sat 
by the road-side, panting in the heat, or 
stretched sleeping in the wheat-fields, or 
splashed in the mud around some stone 
well, where a village maiden dipped the 
iron bucket again and again, and filled 
their canteens, and smiled upon them all 
with equal favor. Now and then a courier 
would break through the cloud of dust, 
taking outline gradually, like an impression 
on a negative, his brass buttons showing 



219 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

first in the sunlight, and then the head of 
the horse, and then the rider, red -faced 
and powdered white, who would scatter 
the column into the hedges, and then dis- 
appear with a rattle and scurry of hoofs 
into the curtain of dust. Commissariat 
wagons stuck in the ruts, and the commis- 
sariat mule, that acts in Albania apparent- 
ly just as he does on the alkali plains of 
Texas, blocked the narrow way, and blows 
and abuse failed to move him. To add to 
the confusion, over a thousand Christian 
peasants chose that inopportune time to 
come into Arta for safety, and brought 
their flocks with them. So that, in the 
last miles of the road, sheep and goats 
jostled the soldiers for the right of way, 
which they shared with little donkeys, carry- 
ing rolls of tents and bedding, and women, 
who in this country come next after the 
four-legged beasts of burden, staggering 
under great iron pots and iron-bound boxes. 
Little children carried children nearly as 
big as themselves, and others lay tossed 

220 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

on the packs of bedding, and others slept 
lashed to their mothers' shoulders in queer, 
three-cornered, trough-like cradles. The men 
and boys, costumed like grand-opera brig- 
ands, dashed shrieking in and out of the 
mob, chasing back the goats and sheep 
that had made a break for liberty, and the 
soldiers helped them, charging the sheep 
with their bayonets, and laughing and 
shouting as though it were some kind of 
game. Over all the dust rose and hung 
in choking clouds, through which the sun 
cast a yellow glare. And so for many hours 
the two armies of peasants and of soldiers 
panted and pushed and struggled towards 
the high narrow bridge that guards the 
way to Arta. 

It is such a bridge as Horatius with two 
others might have held against an army; 
it rises like a rainbow in the air, a great 
stone arch as steep as an inverted V. It 
is made of white stone, with high parapets. 
Into this narrow gorge cannon and ammu- 
nition wagons, goats and sheep, little girls 

221 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

carrying other little girls, mules loaded 
with muskets, mules hidden under packs 
of green fodder, officers struggling with 
terrified horses that threatened to leap 
with them over the parapet into the river 
below, peasants tugging at long strings of 
ponies, women bent to the earth under 
pans and kettles, and company after com- 
pany of weary and sweating soldiers pushed 
and struggled for hours together, while far 
out on either side hordes of the weaker 
brothers, who, leaving it to others to de- 
monstrate the survival of the fittest, had 
dropped by the way -side, lay spread out 
like a great fan, but still from time to time 
feeding the bridge, until it stretched above 
the river like a human chain of men and 
beasts linked together in inextricable con- 
fusion. 

Of course it was a feast day when this 
happened. It always is a feast day of the 
Greek Church when such an event can be 
arranged to particularly inconvenience the 
greatest number of people. There were 

222 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

three in succession at Moscow when the 
Czar was crowned, and for that time no 
bank was opened, and every one borrowed 
from every one else or went hungry. And 
no shop was opened in Arta that night 
when the army retreated upon it, and offi- 
cers and men packed the streets until day- 
light, beating at the closed shutters and 
offering their last drachma for a slice of 
bread, while the shepherds camped out 
with their flocks on the sidewalks and in 
the public squares. 

But the wine -shops were open, and in 
and out of them the soldiers and their offi- 
cers tramped and pushed, hungry and foot- 
sore and thirsty; and though no "lights 
out " sounded that night, or if it did no 
one heard it, there was not a drunken man, 
not a quarrelsome man, in that great mob 
that overwhelmed and swamped the city. 

Late at night, when I turned in on a 

floor that I shared with three others, the 

men were still laughing and singing in the 

streets, and greeting old friends like lost 

223 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

brothers, and utterly unconscious of the 
shadow of war that hung over them, and 
of the fact that the Turks were already far 
advanced on Greek soil, and were threat- 
ening Pharsala, Velestinos, and Volo. 

The Turks had made three attacks on 
Velestinos on three different days, and had 
been repulsed each time. A week later, 
on the 4th of May, they came back again, 
to the number of ten thousand, and brought 
four batteries with them, and the fighting 
continued for two days more. This was 
called the second battle of Velestinos. In 
the afternoon of the 5th the Crown-Prince 
withdrew from Pharsala to take up a 
stronger position at Domokos, and the 
Greeks under General Smolenski, the mili- 
tary hero of the campaign, were forced to 
retreat, and the Turks came in, and, ac- 
cording to their quaint custom, burned the 
village and marched on to Volo. John 
Bass, an American correspondent, and 
myself were keeping house in the village, 

in the home of the mayor. He had fled 

224 




AN AMERICAN WAR CORRESPONDENT (JOHN BASS) DIRECTING 
THE PI RE OF THE GREEKS 




VELESTINOS 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

from the town, as had nearly all of the vil- 
lagers ; and as we liked the appearance of 
his house, I gave Bass a leg up over the 
wall around his garden, and Bass opened 
the gate, and we climbed in through his 
front window. It was like the invasion of 
the home of the Dusantes by Mrs. Leeks 
and Mrs. Aleshine, and, like them, we were 
constantly making discoveries of fresh 
treasure-trove. Sometimes it was in the 
form of a cake of soap or a tin of coffee, 
and once it was the mayor's fluted petti- 
coats, which we tried on, and found very 
heavy. We could not discover what he 
did for pockets. All of these things, and 
the house itself, were burned to ashes, we 
were told, a few hours after we retreated, 
and we feet less troubled now at having 
made such free use of them than we did 
at the time of our occupation. 

On the morning of the 4th we were 
awakened by the firing of cannon from a 
hill just over our heads, and we both got 

up and shook hands in the middle of the 

1 225 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

room. There was to be a battle, and we 
were the only correspondents on the spot. 
As I represented the London Times, Bass 
was the only representative of an Amer- 
ican newspaper who saw this battle from 
its beginning to its end. 

We found all the hills to the left of 
the town topped with long lines of men 
crouching in little trenches. There were 
four rows of hills. If you had measured 
the distance from one hill-top to the next, 
they would have been from one hundred 
to three hundred yards distant from one 
another. In between the hills were gul- 
lies, or little valleys, and the beds of 
streams that had dried up in the hot sun. 
These valleys were filled with high grass 
that waved about in the breeze and was 
occasionally torn up and tossed in the air 
by a shell. The position of the Greek 
forces was very simple. On the top of 
each hill was a trench two or three feet 
deep and some hundred yards long. The 

earth that had been scooped out to make 

226 



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WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

the trench was packed on the edge facing 
the enemy, and on the top of that some of 
the men had piled stones, through which 
they poked their rifles. When a shell 
struck the ridge it would sometimes scatter 
these stones in among the men, and they 
did quite as much damage as the shells. 
Back of these trenches, and down that side 
of the hill which was farther from the en- 
emy, were the reserves, who sprawled at 
length in the long grass, and smoked and 
talked and watched the shells dropping 
into the gully at their feet. 

The battle, which lasted two days, opened 
in a sudden and terrific storm of hail. But 
the storm passed as quickly as it came, 
leaving the trenches running with water, 
like the gutters of a city street after a 
spring shower; and the men soon sopped 
them up with their overcoats and blank- 
ets, and in half an hour the sun had dried 
the wet uniforms, and the field-birds had 
begun to chirp again, and the grass was 

warm and fragrant. The sun was terribly 

227 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

hot. There was no other day during that 
entire brief campaign when its glare was so 
intense or the heat so suffocating. The 
men curled up in the trenches, with their 
heads pressed against the damp earth, pant- 
ing and breathing heavily, and the heat- 
waves danced and quivered about them, 
making the plain below nicker like a pict- 
ure in a cinematograph. 

From time to time an officer would rise 
and peer down into the great plain, shading 
his eyes with his hands, and shout some- 
thing at them, and they would turn quickly 
in the trench and rise on one knee. And 
at the shout that followed they would fire 
four or five rounds rapidly and evenly, and 
then, at a sound from the officer's whistle, 
would drop back again and pick up the 
cigarettes they had placed in the grass 
and begin leisurely to swab out their rifles 
with a piece of dirty rag on a cleaning- 
rod. Down in the plain below there was 
apparently nothing at which they could 

shoot except the great shadows of the 

228 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

clouds drifting across the vast checker- 
board of green and yellow fields, and dis- 
appearing finally between the mountain- 
passes beyond. In some places there were 
square dark patches that might have been 
bushes, and nearer to us than these were 
lone lines of fresh earth, from which steam 
seemed to be escaping in little wisps. 
What impressed us most of what we could 
see of the battle then was the remarkable 
number of cartridges the Greek soldiers 
wasted in firing into space, and the fact 
that they had begun to fire at such long 
range that, in order to get the elevation, 
they had placed the rifle -butt under the 
armpit instead of against the shoulder. 
Their sights were at the top notch. The 
cartridges reminded one of corn-cobs jump- 
ins: out of a corn-sheller, and it was inter- 
esting when the bolts were shot back to 
see a hundred of them pop up into the air 
at the same time, flashing in the sun as 
though they were glad to have done their 

work and to get out again. They rolled 

229 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

by the dozens underfoot, and twinkled in 
the grass, and when one shifted his posi- 
tion in the narrow trench, or stretched his 
cramped legs, they tinkled musically. It 
was like wading in a gutter filled with 
thimbles. 

Then there began a concert which came 
from just overhead — a concert of jarring 
sounds and little whispers. The "shriek- 
ing shrapnel," of which one reads in the 
description of every battle, did not sound 
so much like a shriek as it did like the 
jarring sound of telegraph wires when 
some one strikes the pole from which 
they hang, and when they came very close 
the noise was like the rushing sound that 
rises between two railroad trains when 
they pass each other in opposite direc- 
tions and at great speed. After a few 
hours we learned by observation that when 
a shell sang overhead it had already struck 
somewhere else, which was comforting, 
and which was explained, of course, by 
the fact that the speed of the shell is so 



2TO 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

much greater than the rate at which sound 
travels. The bullets were much more dis- 
turbing ; they seemed to be less open in 
their warfare, and to steal up and sneak 
by, leaving no sign, and only whispering as 
they passed. They moved under a cloak 
of invisibility, and made one feel as though 
he were the blind man in a game of blind- 
man's-buff, where every one tapped him 
in passing, leaving him puzzled and igno- 
rant as to whither they had gone and 
from what point they would come next. 
The bullets sounded like rustling silk, or 
like humming-birds on a warm summer's 
day, or like the wind as it is imitated on 
the stage of a theatre. Any one who has 
stood behind the scenes when a storm is 
progressing on the stage, knows the little 
wheel wound with silk that brushes against 
another piece of silk, and which produces 
the whistling effect of the wind. At Vel- 
estinos, when the firing was very heavy, 
it was exactly as though some one were 

turning one of these silk wheels, and so 

231 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

rapidly as to make the whistling ;;::tin- 
uous. 

When this concert opened, the office - 
shouted out new orders, and each of the 
men shoved his sight nearer to the barrel, 
and when he fired again, rubbed the butt 
of his gun snugly against his shoulder. 
The huge green blotches on the plain had 
turned blue, and now we could distinguish 
that they moved, and that they were m 
in£ steadily ward. Then thev would 
Deasc tc m e, and a little later would be 
hidden behi::. great puffs /: white smoke, 
which were followed by a flash of flai 
and still later there would come a dull re- 
port. At the same instant s me thing would 
hurl itself jarring through the air above 
our heads, and bv turning on one elbow 
\ ; o u 1 d s e : a s 1 1 i d e 1 1 uph eaval in: ) e s 1 1 n ny 
landscape behind us. a spurt t f earth and 
stones like a miniature _ ser, which was 
filled with broken branches and tufts of 
g ass and pieces :: ;.<. As the Turkish 
aim grew better these volcanoes appea 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

higher up the hill, creeping nearer and 
nearer to the rampart of fresh earth on the 

second trench until the shells hammered 
it at last again and again, sweeping it 
away and cutting great gashes in it, 
through which we saw the figures of men 
caught up and hurled to one side, and 
others dinging themselves face downward 
as though they were diving into water; 
and at the same instant in our own trench 
the men would gasp as though they had 
been struck too, and then becoming con- 
scious of having done this would turn and 
smile sheepishlv at each other, and crawl 
closer into the burrows they had made in 
the earth. 

From where we sat on the edge of the 
trench, with our feet among the cartridges, 
we could, bv leaning forward, look over 
the piled-up earth into the the plain below, 
and soon, without any aid from field-gl 
es, we saw the blocks of blue break up 
into groups of men. These men came 
across the ploughed fields in long, widely 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

opened lines, walking easily and leisurely, 
as though they were playing golf or sow- 
ing seed in the furrows. The Greek rifles 
crackled and flashed at the lines, but the 
men below came on quite steadily, picking 
their way over the furrows and appearing 
utterly unconscious of the seven thousand 
rifles that were calling on them to halt. 
They were advancing directly towards a 
little sugar-loaf hill, on the top of which 
was a mountain battery perched like a 
tiara on a woman's head. It was throw- 
ing one shell after another in the very path 
of the men below, but the Turks still con- 
tinued to pick their way across the field, 
without showing any regard for the moun- 
tain battery. It w T as worse than threaten- 
ing; it seemed almost as though they 
meant to insult us. If they had come up 
on a run they would not have appeared so 
contemptuous, for it w T ould have looked 
then as though they were trying to escape 
the Greek fire, or that they were at least 
interested in what was going forward. 

234 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

But the steady advance of so many men, 
each plodding along by himself, with his 
head bowed and his gun on his shoulder, 
was aggravating to a degree. 

There was a little village at the foot of 
the hill. It was so small that no one had 
considered it. It was more like a collec- 
tion of stables gathered round a residence 
than a town, and there was a wall com- 
pletely encircling it, with a gate in the 
wall that faced us. Suddenly the doors 
of this gate were burst open from the in- 
side, and a man in a fez ran through them, 
followed by many more. The first man 
was waving a sword, and a peasant in 
petticoats ran at his side and pointed up 
with his hand at our trench. Until that 
moment the battle had lacked all human 
interest; we might have been watching a 
fight against the stars or the man in the 
moon, and, in spite of the noise and clat- 
ter of the Greek rifles, and the ghostlike 
whispers and the rushing sounds in the 
air, there was nothing to remind us of any 

235 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

other battle of which we had heard or 
read. But we had seen pictures of officers 
waving swords, and we knew that the fez 
was the sign of the Turk — of the enemy — 
of the men who were invading Thessaly, 
who were at that moment planning to 
come up a steep hill on which we hap- 
pened to be sitting and attack the people 
on top of it. And the spectacle at once 
became comprehensible, and took on the 
human interest it had lacked. The men 
seemed to feel this, for they sprang up 
and began cheering and shouting, and 
fired in an upright position, and by so do- 
ing exposed themselves at full length to 
the fire from the men below. The Turks 
in front of the village ran back into it 
again, and those in the fields beyond turn- 
ed and began to move away, but in that 
same plodding, aggravating fashion. They 
moved so leisurely that there was a pause 
in the noise along the line, while the men 
watched them to make sure that they were 

really retreating. And then there was a 

236 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

long cheer, after which they all sat down, 
breathing deeply, and wiping the sweat and 
dust across their faces, and took long pulls 
at their canteens. 

The different trenches were not all en- 
gaged at the same time. They acted ac- 
cording to the individual judgment of 
their commanding officer, but always for 
the general good. Sometimes the fire of 
the enemy would be directed on one par- 
ticular trench, and it would be impossible 
for the men in that trench to rise and re- 
ply without having their heads carried 
away; so they would lie hidden, and the 
men in the trenches flanking them would 
act in their behalf, and rake the enemy 
from the front and from every side, un- 
til the fire on that trench was silenced, 
or turned upon some other point. The 
trenches stretched for over half a mile in 
a semicircle, and the little hills over which 
they ran lay at so many different angles, 
and rose to such different heights, that 
sometimes the men in one trench fired di- 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

rectly over the heads of their own men. 
From many trenches in the first line it 
was impossible to see any of the Greek 
soldiers except those immediately beside 
you. If you looked back or beyond on 
either hand there was nothing to be seen 
but high hills topped with fresh earth, and 
the waving yellow grass, and the glaring 
blue sky. 

General Smolenski directed the Greeks 
from the plain to the far right of the town; 
and his presence there, although none of 
the men saw him nor heard of him direct- 
ly throughout the entire day, was more 
potent for good than would have been the 
presence of five thousand other men held in 
reserve. He was a mile or two miles away 
from the trenches, but the fact that he was 
there, and that it was Smolenski who was 
giving the orders, was enough. Few had 
ever seen Smolenski, but his name was 
sufficient; it was as effective as is Mr. 
Bowen's name on a Bank of England note. 

It gave one a pleasant feeling to know 

23s 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

that he was somewhere within call ; you 
felt there would be no "routs" nor stam- 
pedes while he was there. And so for 
two days those seven thousand men lay 
in the trenches, repulsing attack after at- 
tack of the Turkish troops, suffocated with 
the heat and chilled with sudden showers, 
and swept unceasingly by shells and bullets 
— partly because they happened to be good 
men and brave men, but largely because 
they knew that somewhere behind them 
a stout, bull-necked soldier was sitting on 
a camp-stool, watching them through a 
pair of field-glasses. 

Towards mid-day you would see a man 
leave the trench with a comrade's arm 
around him, and start on the long walk to 
the town where the hospital corps w r ere 
waiting for him. These men did not wear 
their wounds with either pride or bragga- 
docio, but regarded the wet sleeves and 
shapeless arms in a sort of wondering sur- 
prise. There was much more of surprise 
than of pain in their faces, and they seemed 

239 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 



to be puzzling as to what they had done 
in the past to deserve such a punishment. 
Other men were carried out of the trench 
and laid on their backs on the high grass, 
staring up drunkenly at the glaring sun, 
and with their limbs fallen into unfamiliar 
poses. They lay so still, and they were so 
utterly oblivious of the roar and rattle and 
the anxious energy around them that one 
grew rather afraid of them and of their su- 
periority to their surroundings. The sun 
beat on them, and the insects in the grass 
waving above them buzzed and hummed, 
or burrowed in the warm moist earth upon 
which they lay; over their heads the invis- 
ible carriers of death jarred the air with 
shrill crescendoes, and near them a com- 
rade sat hacking with his bayonet at a 
lump of hard bread. He sprawled con- 
tentedly in the hot sun, with humped 
shoulders and legs far apart, and with his 
cap tipped far over his eyes. Every now 
and again he would pause, with a piece of 

cheese balanced on the end of his knife- 

240 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

blade, and look at the twisted figures by 
him on the grass, or he would dodge in- 
voluntarily as a shell swung low above his 
head, and smile nervously at the still forms 
on either side of him that had not moved. 
Then he brushed the crumbs from his 
jacket and took a drink out of his hot can- 
teen, and looking again at the sleeping fig- 
ures pressing down the long grass beside 
him, crawled back on his hands and knees 
to the trench and picked up his waiting 
rifle. 

The dead gave dignity to what the other 
men were doing, and made it noble, and, 
from another point of view, quite senseless. 
For their dying had proved nothing. Men 
who could have been much better spared 
than they, were still alive in the trenches, 
and for no reason but through mere dumb 
chance. There was no selection of the 
unfittest; it seemed to be ruled by unrea- 
soning luck. A certain number of shells 
and bullets passed through a certain area 
of space, and men of different bulks 

Q 241 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

blocked that space in different places. If 
a man happened to be standing in the line 
of a bullet he was killed and passed into 
eternity, leaving a wife and children, per- 
haps, to mourn him. " Father died," these 
children will say, " doing his duty." As a 
matter of fact, father died because he hap- 
pened to stand up at the wrong moment, 
or because he turned to ask the man on 
his right for a match, instead of leaning 
towards the left, and he projected his bulk 
of two hundred pounds where a bullet, fired 
by a man who did not know him and who 
had not aimed at him, happened to w r ant 
the right of way. One of the two had to 
give it, and as the bullet would not, the 
soldier had his heart torn out. The man 
who sat next to me happened to move to 
fill his cartridge-box just as the bullet that 
wanted the space he had occupied passed 
over his bent shoulder; and so he was 
not killed, but will live for sixty years, 
perhaps, and will do much good or much 

evil. Another man in the same trench 

242 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

sat up to clean out his rifle, and had his 
arm in the air driving the cleaning-rod 
down the barrel, when a bullet passed 
through his lungs, and the gun fell across 
his face, with the rod sticking in it, and he 
pitched forward on his shoulder quite dead. 
If he had not cleaned his gun at that mo- 
ment he would probably be alive in Athens 
now, sitting in front of a cafe and fighting 
the war over again. Viewed from that 
point, and leaving out the fact that God 
ordered it all, the fortunes of the game 
of war seemed as capricious as matching 
pennies, and as impersonal as the wheel at 
Monte Carlo. In it the brave man did not 
win because he was brave, but because he 
was lucky. A fool and a philosopher are 
equal at a game of dice. And these men 
who threw dice with death were interest- 
ing to watch, because, though they gam- 
bled for so great a stake, they did so 
unconcernedly and without flinching, and 
without apparently appreciating the seri- 
ousness of the game. 

243 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

There was a red -headed, freckled peas- 
ant boy, in dirty petticoats, who guided 
Bass and myself to the trenches. He was 
one of the few peasants who had not run 
away, and as he had driven sheep over 
every foot of the hills, he elected to guide 
the soldiers through those places where 
they were best protected from the bullets 
of the enemy. He did this all day, and 
was always, whether coming or going, un- 
der a heavy fire ; but he enjoyed that fact, 
and he seemed to regard the battle only as 
a delightful change in the quiet routine of 
his life, as one of our own country boys at 
home would regard the coming of the spring 
circus or the burning of a neighbor's barn. 
He ran dancing ahead of us, pointing to 
where a ledge of rock offered a natural 
shelter, or showing us a steep gully where 
the bullets could not fall. When they came 
very near him he would jump high in the 
air, not because he was startled, but out of 
pure animal joy in the excitement of it, 

and he would frown importantly and shake 

244 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

his red curls at us, as though to say : " I 
told you to be careful. Now, you see. 
Don't let that happen again." We met 
him many times during the two days, es- 
corting different companies of soldiers 
from one point to another, as though they 
were visitors to his estate. When a shell 
broke, he would pick up a piece and pre- 
sent it to the officer in charge, as though 
it were a flower he had plucked from his 
own garden, and which he wanted his 
guest to carry away with him as a souve- 
nir of his visit. Some one asked the boy 
if his father and mother knew where he 
was, and he replied, with amusement, that 
they had run away and deserted him, and 
that he had remained because he wished 
to see what a Turkish army looked like. 
He was a much more plucky boy than 
the overrated Casabianca, who may have 
stood on the burning deck whence all 
but him had fled because he could not 
swim, and because it was with him a 
choice of being either burned or drowned. 

245 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

This boy stuck to the burning deck when 
it was possible for him at any time to 
have walked away and left it burning. 
But he stayed on because he was amused, 
and because he was able to help the sol- 
diers from the city in safety across his 
native heath. I wrote something about 
him at the time, but I do not apologize for 
telling about him again, because he was 
the best part of the show, and one of the 
bravest Greeks on the field. He will grow 
up to be something fine, no doubt, and his 
spirit will rebel against having to spend 
his life watching his father's sheep. He 
may even win the race from Marathon. 
It would be an excellent thing for Greece 
if some one discovered that, in spite of the 
twenty years discrepancy in their ages, he 
and the Crown - Prince had been changed 
at birth. 

Another Greek who was a most inter- 
esting figure to us was a Lieutenant Am- 
broise Frantzis. He was in command of 

the mountain battery on the fiat, round 

246 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

top of the high hill. On account of its 
height the place seemed much nearer to 
the sun than any other part of the world, 
and the heat there was three times as fierce 
as in the trenches below. When you had 
climbed to the top of this hill it was like 
standing on a roof-garden, or as though 
you were watching a naval battle from the 
mast-head of one of the battle-ships. The 
top of the hill was not unlike an immense 
circus ring in appearance. The piled-up 
earth around its circular edge gave that 
impression, and the glaring yellow wheat 
that was tramped into the glaring yellow 
soil, and the blue ammunition-boxes scat- 
tered about, helped out the idea. It was 
an exceedingly busy place, and the smoke 
drifted across it continually, hiding us from 
one another in a curtain of flying yellow 
dust, while over our heads the Turkish 
shells raced after each other so rapidly 
that they beat out the air like the branches 
of a tree in a storm. On account of its 
height, and the glaring heat, and the shells 

247 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

passing, and the Greek guns going off 
and then turning somersaults, it was not a 
place suited for meditation ; but Ambroise 
Frantzis meditated there as though he were 
in his own study. He was a very young 
man and very shy, and he was too busy to 
consider his own safety, or to take time, as 
the others did, to show that he was not 
considering it. Some of the other officers 
stood up on the breastworks and called 
the attention of the men to what they 
were doing ; but as they did not wish the 
men to follow their example in this, it was 
difficult to see what they expected to gain 
by their braggadocio. Frantzis was as un- 
concerned as an artist painting a big pict- 
ure in his studio. The battle plain below 
him was his canvas, and his nine mountain- 
guns were his paint-brushes. And he paint- 
ed out Turks and Turkish cannon with 
the same concentrated, serious expression 
of countenance that you see on the face of 
an artist when he bites one brush between 

his lips and with another wipes out a false 

248 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

line or a touch of the wrong color. You 
have seen an artist cock his head on one 
side, and shut one eye and frown at his can- 
vas, and then select several brushes and 
mix different colors and hit the canvas a 
bold stroke, and then lean back to note the 
effect. Frantzis acted in just that way. 
He would stand with his legs apart and 
his head on one side, pulling meditatively 
at his pointed beard, and then he would 
take a closer look through his field-glasses, 
and then select the three guns which he 
had decided would give him the effect that 
he wanted to produce, and he would pro- 
duce that effect. When the shot struck 
plump in the Turkish lines, and we could 
see the earth leap up into the air like gey- 
sers of muddy water, and every one would 
wave his cap and cheer, Frantzis would 
only smile uncertainly, and begin again to 
puzzle out fresh combinations with the aid 
of his field-glasses. 

The battle that had begun in a storm of 
hail ended on the first day in a storm of 

249 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

bullets that had been held in reserve by 
the Turks, and which were let off just after 
sundown. They came from a natural trench, 
formed by the dried-up bed of a stream 
which lay just below the hill on which the 
first Greek trench was situated. There 
were bushes growing on the bank of the 
stream nearest to the Greek lines, and these 
hid the men who occupied it. Throughout 
the day there had been an irritating fire 
from this trench from what appeared to be 
not more than a dozen rifles, but we could 
see that it was fed from time to time with 
many boxes of ammunition, which were 
carried to it on the backs of mules from 
the Turkish position a half-mile farther to 
the rear. Bass and a corporal took a great 
aversion to this little group of Turks, not 
because there were too many of them to 
be disregarded, but because they were so 
near; and Bass kept the corporal's ser- 
vices engaged in firing into it, and in dis- 
couraonne the ammunition -mules when 

they were being driven in that direction. 

250 




> 




WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

Our corporal was a sharp-shooter, and, ac- 
cordingly, felt his superiority to his com- 
rades ; and he had that cheerful contempt 
for his officers that all true Greek soldiers 
enjoy, and so he never joined in the volley- 
firing, but kept his ammunition exclusively 
for the dozen men behind the bushes and 
for the mules. He waged, as it were, a 
little battle on his own account. The other 
men rose as commanded and fired regular 
volleys, and sank back again, but he fixed 
his sights to suit his own idea of the range, 
and he rose when he was ready to do so, 
and fired whenever he thought best. When 
his officer, who kept curled up in the hol- 
low of the trench, commanded him to lie 
down, he would frown and shake his head 
at the interruption, and paid no further 
attention to the order. He was as much 
alone as a hunter on a mountain peak 
stalking deer, and whenever he fired at 
the men in the bushes he would swear 
softly, and when he fired at the mules he 
would chuckle and laugh with delight 

2=il 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

and content. The mules had to cross a 
ploughed field in order to reach the bush- 
es, and so we were able to mark where his 
bullets struck, and we could see them skip 
across the field, kicking up the dirt as they 
advanced, until they stopped the mule al- 
together, or frightened the man who was 
leading it into a disorderly retreat. 

It appeared later that instead of there 
being but twelve men in these bushes 
there were six hundred, and that they were 
hiding there until the sun set in order to 
make a final attack on the first trench. 
They had probably argued that at sunset 
the strain of the day's work would have 
told on the Greek morale, that the men's 
nerves would be jerking and their stomachs 
aching for food, and that they would be 
ready for darkness and sleep, and in no 
condition to repulse a fresh and vigorous 
attack. So, just as the sun sank, and the 
officers were counting the cost in dead and 
wounded, and the men were gathering up 

blankets and overcoats, and the firing from 

252 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

the Greek lines had almost ceased, there 
came a fierce rattle from the trench to the 
right of us, like a watch-dog barking the 
alarm, and the others took it up from all 
over the hill, and when we looked down 
into the plain below to learn what it meant, 
we saw it blue with men, who seemed to 
have sprung from the earth. They were 
clambering from the bed of the stream, 
breaking through the bushes, and forming 
into a long line, which, as soon as formed, 
was at once hidden at regular intervals by 
flashes of flame that seemed to leap from 
one gun -barrel to the next, as you have 
seen a current of electricity run along a 
line of gas-jets. In the dim twilight these 
flashes were much more blinding: than 
they had been in the glare of the sun, and 
the crash of the artillery coming on top of 
the silence was the more fierce and terrible 
by the contrast. The Turks were so close 
on us that the first trench could do little to 
help itself, and the men huddled against it 
while their comrades on the surrounding 

253 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

hills fought for them, their volleys passing 
close above our heads, and meeting the 
rush of the Turkish bullets on the way, so 
that there was now one continuous whist- 
ling shriek, like the roar of the wind 
through the rigging of a ship in a storm. 
If a man had raised his arm above his 
head his hand would have been torn off. 
It had come up so suddenly that it was 
like two dogs springing at each others' 
throats, and in a greater degree it had 
something of the sound of two wild animals 
struggling for life. Volley answered vol- 
ley as though with personal hate — one 
crashing in upon the roll of the other, or 
beating it out of recognition with the burst- 
ing roar of heavy cannon. At the same 
instant all of the Turkish batteries opened 
with great, ponderous, booming explosions, 
and the little mountain-guns barked and 
snarled and shrieked back at them, and the 
rifle volleys crackled and shot out blister- 
ing flames, while the air was filled with in- 
visible express trains that shook and jarred 

254 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

it and crashed into one another, bursting 
and shrieking and groaning. It seemed 
as though you were lying in a burning 
forest, with giant tree trunks that had with- 
stood the storms of centuries crashing and 
falling around your ears, and sending up 
great showers of sparks and flame. This 
lasted for five minutes or less, and then the 
death - grip seemed to relax, the volleys 
came brokenly, like a man panting for 
breath, the bullets ceased to sound with 
the hiss of escaping steam, and rustled aim- 
lessly by, and from hill-top to hill-top the 
officers' whistles sounded as though a 
sportsman were calling off his dogs. The 
Turks withdrew into the coming night, 
and the Greeks lay back, panting and 
sweating, and stared open-eyed at one 
another, like men who had looked for a 
moment into hell, and had come back to 
the world again. 

The next day was like the first, except 
that by five o'clock in the afternoon the 
Turks appeared on our left flank, crawling 

255 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

across the hills like an invasion of great 
ants, and the Greek army that had made 
the two best and most dignified stands 
of the war at Velestinos withdrew upon 
Halmyros, and the Turks poured into the 
village and burned it, leaving nothing 
standing save two tall Turkish minarets 
that they had built many years before, 
when Thessaly belonged to the Sultan. 

There have been many Turkish mina- 
rets within the last two years standing 
above burning villages and deserted homes 
all over Asia Minor and Armenia. They 
have looked down upon the massacre of 
twenty thousand people within these last 
two years, and upon the destruction of no 
one knows how many villages. If the 
five Powers did not support these mina- 
rets, they would crumble away and fall to 
pieces. Greece tried to upset them, but 
she was not brave enough, nor wise enough, 
nor strong enough, and so they still stand, 

as these two stand at Velestinos, pointing 

256 



WITH THE GREEK SOLDIERS 

to the sky above the ruins of the pret- 
ty village. Some people think that all of 
them have been standing quite long enough 
— that it is time they came down forever. 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 



AS the day for celebrating the Dia- 
h moncl Jubilee drew nearer, the inter- 
est in it increased in proportion, and fed 
on itself, spreading and growing until it 
overwhelmed every other interest of the 
British Empire. To the people of London 
the signs of its approach were only too ob- 
vious, but long before it had given any 
outward warning of its coming in that 
city, men were already working to make it 
a success, not in the Lord Chamberlain's 
office alone, but in barracks and work- 
shops, in fields and in ship-yards, and it 
had upset values and demoralized trade in 
certain avenues all over the wide world. 
So far in advance did the people prepare 

for its coming that managers of hotels in 

261 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

London bought up whole fields before the 
green stuffs they would produce later had 
been planted and while the ground was 
covered with snow. An invitation to dine 
on a certain night in June was sent to the 
colonial premiers in January, six months 
before the dinner was cooked ; and on ac- 
count of the expected presence in London 
of an additional million and a half of people, 
food stuffs to feed them were imported 
months before, and freight rates from the 
River Plate and New Zealand rose thirty per 
cent, in consequence. This fact alone, which 
comes from the underwriters, suggests how 
far-reaching were the effects of the Jubilee, 
and also how tightly the world is now knit 
together, since a street parade in London 
disturbs traffic in Auckland and on the 
Bay of Plenty. The people in London 
regarded the celebration itself from two 
widely different points of view — some were 
for putting themselves as far away from it 
as possible, while the one idea of the oth- 
ers was to use their influence and money 

262 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

to see it all, and to the best advantage. 
So earnest were the former in their efforts to 
escape that all of the steam-launches on the 
Thames were hired for Jubilee Day many 
weeks in advance ; while for the use of the 
others every window facing the route of 
the procession was put at their disposal, 
either by invitation or at prices ranging 
from five dollars to five hundred. One 
house in Piccadilly was rented for the 
week to an American at ten thousand dol- 
lars. A room facing St. Paul's Cathedral, 
in front of which the chief ceremony of the 
day occurred, was advertised at twenty-five 
hundred dollars ; seats on a roof at the 
same place were sold for fifty dollars each; 
and, in order to obtain room for a stand 
near by, an entire building was torn down, 
the lessees contracting to replace it after 
the Jubilee with another. 

For a month previous to the Jubilee this 
speculation in windows and stands seemed 
to be the chief means in London of mak- 
ing money. It was like a miniature South 

263 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

Sea bubble, or the late gamble in Kaffirs; 
syndicate after syndicate bought up the 
building-lots and half-finished houses bor- 
dering on the route of the procession, and 
came into the market offering seats at the 
best place from which to see it, which 
seemed to be at every possible point along 
the entire route, The prices asked by 
these gentlemen had their effect, and soon 
there was hardly a building of any sort 
that faced or was even near the route that 
was not converted into a stand for specta- 
tors. Churches built huge structures over 
their graveyards that towered almost to 
the steeples, and theatres, hotels, restau- 
rants, and shops of every description were 
so covered with scaffoldings that it was 
impossible to distinguish a book-store from 
a public-house, so enveloped were they by 
planks and price-lists of seats. Some of 
the shopkeepers advertised " free " seats to 
the most generous purchasers of their 
wares, and others offered luncheon and 

dinner, with the choice of "champagne or 

264 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

tea," to possible patrons. Landlords and 
householders along the route gave notice 
to tenants of months' occupation whose 
windows faced the streets to move out at 
once, and as the tenants naturally object- 
ed, a series of forcible evictions took place, 
and in many cases the neighbors sided 
with the tenants, and there were fighting 
and rioting in consequence. Paragraphs 
like the following appeared in the papers 
daily: 

"Another Jubilee eviction took place last evening 
amid great excitement in the Borough Road. The 
doors of the house were barricaded, and had to be bat- 
tered in before admission could be. obtained. A large 
force of police were present." 

The demand for windows and seats gave 
a rare chance to the unscrupulous, and the 
same seats were sold several times to dif- 
ferent people by men who had no right to 
sell them at all. These gentlemen even 
went so far afield as Port Said, where they 
met passengers from Australia and India 

and showed them plans of seats, and sold 

265 



I 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

them, in exchange for many guineas, beau- 
tifully colored tickets that called for places 
which only existed on paper ; and even the 
astute " Yankees," to the delight of the 
English newspapers, when they arrived at 
Liverpool, were cajoled into buying from 
these ingenious gentlemen, one man pay- 
ing two hundred and fifty dollars for two 
seats for which he may be still looking. 

This gamble for seats was perhaps un- 
fortunate in giving the impression that the 
Jubilee, instead of being an expression of 
devotion and loyalty, had been turned into 
a chance for money-making, and that the 
nation of shopkeepers was living up to its 
name. As a matter of fact, this was not 
the case, and more money was spent by 
the shopkeepers in decorating and illumi- 
nating than they received from their win- 
dows ; and the syndicates, as it turned out 
eventually, lost heavily, and many of the 
speculators were left absolutely bankrupt ; 
as the contractors who supplied them with 

lumber raised the prices to four and five 

266 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

times the regular figures, and the carpen- 
ters and joiners went on strike daily for 
higher and higher wages, until it was esti- 
mated that the average cost of building 
a stand rose from twelve shillings a seat 
to nineteen shillings, so that if the specu- 
lators had asked a guinea for eighteen 
inches of pine board they would only have 
made fifty cents profit. Even had the 
prices originally demanded by the specu- 
lators and syndicates been paid by the 
public, they would not have recovered 
what they had spent in labor and material. 
As it was, when the day arrived, seats ad- 
vertised at fifteen dollars sold for two dol- 
lars and a half, and those facing St. Paul's 
Cathedral, which were advertised at one 
hundred and twenty-five dollars, were sold 
for twenty-five dollars. That was the aver- 
age drop in prices all along the line of 
procession. 

While this speculation was raging, and 
contractors and syndicates and labor un- 
ions and landlords were showing a sordid 

267 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

desire for the mighty dollar, the remainder 
of the people were going quite mad in their 
loyalty and enthusiasm over the Queen 
and the greatest birthday of her reign. 
Ambitious and intricate illuminations com- 
posed of colored glass and gas-jets began 
to spread over the entire city. There was 
not a street, hardly a house, that did not 
show the letters V. R. Sometimes they 
were cut out of colored paper with a pair 
of scissors and stuck behind a dirty win- 
dow-pane, and sometimes they were of cut 
glass and weighed many pounds, and hid 
the entire story of a house, and they be- 
came as familiar on the front of every 
Englishman's castle as they are on the 
round red letter-boxes. Gilded lions and 
unicorns, imperial crowns of colored glass, 
and the numerals 37-97 formed with rows 
of tiny fairy-lamps, and the flags of Eng- 
land reproduced in silk or in printed mus- 
lin, testified to the loyalty of shopkeepers, 
householders, clubs, banks, and hotels. 

Members of the royal family, whenever 

268 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

they appeared in public, were received 
more royally than they had ever been be- 
fore ; and at the military tournament, at 
the theatres, and at all the music-halls, 
songs, scenes, and ballets illustrating the 
growth and power of the empire were the 
chief features of each performance, and 
were received nightly with shouts and 
cheers. At one music-hall the national 
anthem was sung three times in one even- 
ing, the audience rising each time and 
singing the words as fervently as though 
they were in church. One of the most cu- 
rious illustrations of the feeling of the Eng- 
lish people at the time of the Jubilee oc- 
curred one night in the Savoy restaurant 
— perhaps the last place one would look 
for the higher emotions — when the Hun- 
garian band suddenly struck into the na- 
tional anthem, and the entire room, filled 
with strangers, of men from all over the 
world and of women from both worlds, 
rose from their chairs and cheered and 

waved napkins, and remained standing 

269 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

until the music ended and while their din- 
ners grew cold. 

It is difficult to believe that any event 
could ever disturb the settled majesty of 
London, or that any power would dare to 
intrude upon her inexorable laws of the 
road, upon her early closing hours, her 
sombre, sooty countenance, and the in- 
terminable caravans in her streets. Even 
an earthquake would hesitate at the im- 
pertinence of jarring London. But the 
Jubilee upset that city as it is to be hoped 
nothing ever will do again, and for three 
weeks the capital of the world did not 
know herself. She was like the old lady 
who had her skirts cut off and at whom 
even her own dog barked. For her great 
orim house-fronts, which the soft soot had 
turned into sweet and venerable castles, 
were painted a glaring yellow ; her public 
statues were scrubbed until they were 
positively indecent; her islands of safety 
at the crossways were uprooted and the 

street lamps carried away; her sky-line 

270 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

was broken by tiers of yellow-pine seats ; 
her great thoroughfares, the highways of 
the world, were lined with giant packing- 
cases instead of houses ; and her deep 
murmur which rumbles and rises and falls 
like the " roaring loom of Time," was 
broken by the ceaseless banging of ham- 
mers and the scraping of saws. The smell 
of soft coal, which is perhaps the first and 
most distinctive feature of London to greet 
the arriving American, was changed to 
that of green pine, so that the town smelt 
like a Western mining-camp. All the old 
landmarks disappeared, the National Gal- 
lery was disguised by a grandstand as 
large as that at the Polo Grounds, the 
statues in Trafalgar Square peeped over 
high wooden fences, and looked as though 
they had been boxed up for shipment ; in- 
some places trees were cut down, and in 
others stands were built high in the air 
above them, so that where there had been 
open places, with green turf and waving 

branches, there were fixed interminable 

271 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

walls of yellow boards. Between the ris- 
ing skeletons of rafters and scaffolding 
there came what was at first a hardly per- 
ceptible increase in the great tidal waves 
of traffic ; but this swelled and grew until 
at certain points all movements in the 
streets were stopped for half -hours at a 
time, and carriages went where the current 
took them and not where they wished to 
go. At Hamilton Place, and where Berke- 
ley Street breaks into Piccadilly, it would 
have been possible at many hours of the 
day to walk for a hundred yards on the 
tops of hansoms and 'buses and vans, lock- 
ed together as tightly as logs in a jam of 
lumber. One man, who was driving his 
own dog-cart to a luncheon, was caught in 
the crush at Hamilton Place, and sent his 
groom into the Bachelors' Club to forward 
a telegram to his hostess, saying he would 
probably be late, and he arrived eventually 
twenty minutes after the telegram had 
been received. On account of these dams 

in the current, cabmen discovered new 

272 



the queen's jubilee 

streets in unknown territories, or refused 
point - blank to venture into certain thor- 
oughfares unless they were taken by the 
hour. Others did not attempt to take out 
a cab at all, for a shilling fare often kept 
them buried for an hour and a half in 
some great barricade that moved only when 
the sweating policeman had broken anoth- 
er barricade as great, and one of the two 
lurched forward, with brakes snapping as 
they were unlocked, and whips cracking, 
and hundreds of hoofs slipping and pound- 
ing on the asphalt. 

But it was on the sidewalks that the 
coming event cast its most picturesque 
shadows, and showed the most effective 
signs of the times. These shadows were 
substantial enough, and wore kharki tu- 
nics, and broad sombreros, and bandoleers 
heavy with cartridges swinging from the 
left shoulder, or they were in brilliant 
turbans of India silk, or red fezes; they 
were black of face, or brown, or yellow, 
and up to that time they had been familiar 

s 273 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

to the cockneys of London only through 
the illustrated papers and the ballads of 
Mr. Rudyard Kipling. But now they met 
them face to face, wearing their odd uni- 
forms, speaking their impossible tongues, 
and worshipping strange gods, but each of 
them showing in every movement that it 
was a British drill-sergeant who had pulled 
his shoulders back and chucked his chin 
in the air, and taught him to swagger and 
cut his leg with his whip when he walked, 
and to stick it in his boot when he stood 
at ease, with his gauntlets under his shoul- 
der-strap. There were so many things 
to look at in those Jubilee days that per- 
haps no one appreciated them fully until 
they were gone, and Tommy in his red 
jacket and pill -box cap began once more 
to take his original value in the life of the 
streets. But while they continued, not 
even a house-maid looked at him. Even 
the red and gold liveries of the royal 
coachmen, who were as plentiful as han- 
som-cab drivers, were no more regarded 

274 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

in comparison than the red coats of the 
crossing -sweepers. It was the Colonials 
that people turned to look after; and the 
Chinese police from the British treaty- 
port at Hong-kong, with flat enamelled 
soup-plates on their heads ; and the broad- 
lipped negroes from the Gold Coast of 
Africa, and Jamaica, and Trinidad; the 
reformed head-hunters from Borneo, now 
clothed in brown kharki and in their right 
minds ; and the Mohammedans from Cy- 
prus, at whom the costers in the East End 
hooted at first, mistaking them for the un- 
speakable Turk. But before all the others 
the Rhodesian Horse, because they were 
associated in the mind of the " man on the 
omnibus" with Cecil Rhodes and the Ma- 
tabele wars and the Jameson raid. There 
was much reason to envy these happy few 
who were chosen to represent the different 
British colonies and possessions at the 
Jubilee, for London does not hold out her 
hand to most strangers. Some, when they 
go there, are thankful enough to have their 

275 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

existence recognized by a hansom -cab 
driver raising his whip, and the translation 
of these men must have been startling. 
They were probably worthy young men, 
but at home they were part of a whole 
regiment, and of no more honor in their 
own country than so many policemen, 
while in their eyes London was the capital 
of the world, and a place where good colo- 
nists go to spend money, and where they 
are content if they can look on as humble 
spectators. But these men found, when 
they reached the great capital, that they 
were as gods and heroes, and their strange 
uniforms passed them freely into theatres 
and music-halls and public - houses, and 
women smiled on them, and men quarrel- 
led to have the privilege of standing them 
a drink. Banquets and special perform- 
ances, medals and titles, were showered 
upon them according to their rank and de- 
gree, and they in their turn furnished the 
most picturesque feature of the spectacle 

when it came. 

276 




THE STAFF-OFFICERS OF THE INDIAN ARMY 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

Within a week of the great day the 
stands began to clothe themselves decent- 
ly in red cloth, and those decorations that 
had been held back until the last, from 
fear of the rain, were hung on the outer 
walls, and mottoes and insignia and plants 
and flowers, which made the shops look 
like house -boats at Henley, were spread 
along every foot of the six miles. To see 
these, a procession of wagons, drags, and 
'buses travelled over the route carrying 
people from the suburbs and from all over 
London, and the already swollen avenues 
of traffic became impassable, and it was 
only possible to move about by going on 
foot. When a stranger asked how long it 
would take to reach a certain point, he was 
told, ten minutes if he walked, or forty min- 
utes if he took a cab. The decorations 
were not beautiful, and, with the exception 
of those in St. James's Street, there was no 
harmony of design nor scheme of color, 
and a great opportunity was lost. There 

was probably no other time when so much 

277 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

money was spent in display with results so 
inadequate. Had the government put the 
matter in the hands of a committee of ar- 
tists, much might have been done that 
would teach a lesson for the future, and 
have made the route of the procession a 
valley full of beauty and significance ; but, 
as it was, every householder followed his 
own ideas, and so, while the loyalty dis- 
played was quite evident, the taste was 
most primitive. It was the same sort of 
decoration that one sees on a Christmas- 
tree. 

The prophets of disaster and the sensa- 
tion-mongers were not idle in those days, 
and, looking back now to the event, it is 
hardly possible to believe the celebration 
held such terrors at the time, for nearly 
every one thought it could not come off 
without such another sacrifice as that at 
Moscow during the Coronation, or the pan- 
ic at the Charity Bazaar in Paris. One pre- 
diction was that the Embankment would 

not be able to support the crowd, and that 

278 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

it would cave in on the tracks of the under- 
ground railroad. Another was that the 
East End would rise in its might and take 
possession of the stands, and would keep 
the seats for which the West End had paid 
so many guineas ; and it was said that eight 
thousand coffins had been ordered in Paris, 
and had been sent over in readiness for 
the loss of life that was expected to follow 
when the masses gathered in such a multi- 
tude. And forebodings of falling stands 
and sudden panics, and of fires, and of mobs 
of people crushing each other to death, 
were in the minds of every one. That none 
of these things happened was perhaps the 
most remarkable and interesting fact of the 
whole Jubilee. In any other city one or 
all of these things might have occurred, 
but the English conservatism, and the 
English regard for the law, and the won- 
derful management and executive ability 
shown in organizing the procession and 
in disciplining the spectators, prevented 

it. The chief credit is undoubtedly due 

279 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

to the head of the police, and to the fact 
that when he had decided which was the 
best way to regulate the movements of the 
people, the people were willing to abide by 
his decision. For many months before the 
procession the police studied the map of 
London, with the line of the parade marked 
out on it, and considered every possible 
accident that might occur, and every act 
that might lead up to such an accident. 
They rehearsed what the populace would 
do at every hour of the day ; from which 
points people would come on foot, and 
from which points they would come in 
carriages ; where they would collect in the 
greatest numbers ; and when the proces- 
sion had passed one point, in what direc- 
tion they would rush in order to view it 
from another. 

The problem was such a one as would 
present itself to the police of New York, 
were it necessary to protect a route six 
miles in length which would cross from 

New York to Brooklyn over one bridge 

280 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

and return by another, were there such a 
bridge. It was expected that three millions 
of people would view the procession, and 
that it would be necessary to bring fifty 
thousand soldiers into London in order to 
line the route properly — that is, with as 
many soldiers as, had they been placed 
shoulder to shoulder, would have stretched 
in a straight line for thirty-two miles. The 
chief danger that presented itself was that 
the crowd, having seen the procession in 
London, would rush across to the Surrey 
side to see it again, and that the people on 
the Surrey side would cross over to London. 
The police cut this Gordian knot by treat- 
ing the two banks of the river separately, 
and by closing London Bridge at midnight 
on the day before the Jubilee, and the four 
bridges nearest to the route of the proces- 
sion on the day of the Jubilee from eight 
in the morning until three in the afternoon. 
In other parts of London all vehicular traf- 
fic was stopped at different points from 

seven o'clock up to ten, and only certain 

2S1 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

streets crossing the line of the procession 
were open. No carts or wagons, or even 
people on horseback, were allowed to take 
up a place in the cross streets within a hun- 
dred feet of the procession, and no boxes 
nor ladders nor camp-stools were allowed 
within the same limited boundaries. The 
greatest danger to the public safety during 
the great parades in New York City is the 
criminal practice of allowing trucks and 
drays, which are used as temporary stands, 
to take up places on the cross streets. In 
case of a stampede they would completely 
cut off every outlet from the main thor- 
oughfare, and impede the passage of fire- 
engines and ambulances. It is a mistaken 
kindness on the part of the authorities, for, 
while the owners of the trucks and drays 
may make a few dollars by renting seats, 
their barricades may cost many hundreds 
of lives. 

This route over which the Queen was to 
drive, and which was guarded so admirably, 

and made beautiful by the display of such 

282 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

loyal good feeling, held in its six miles of 
extent more places of historical value to the 
English -speaking race than perhaps any 
other six miles that could be picked off on 
a map of the world. 

One of the English papers said that 
each step of the route was a lesson in 
English history, and pointed out some of 
the many features that made it historical ; 
and it was these points of interest that gave 
the route and the procession its great dig- 
nity and its magnificent significance. It 
was not the troops that guarded it, nor the 
decorations of an hour that hung on its two 
sides, nor the flying banners that hid it 
from the sun. Queen Victoria was the 
first English sovereign to use Buckingham 
Palace as a royal residence, and, according 
to the route laid down for her to follow on 
the 2 2d of June, it was from this palace, 
which she had first entered a month after 
her accession, sixty years before, that she 
was to set forth on the greatest triumphal 

procession of her reign. Three millions 

2S3 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

of loyal subjects and crown-princes of for- 
eign and barbarous courts, ambassadors 
and Christian archbishops, field -marshals 
and colonial premiers, red-coated Tommys, 
costers, and publicans, would line this route 
to greet her on her way ; but greater than 
any of these were the dumb statues and 
silent signs of those who had gone before, 
who had made that triumphal procession 
possible, who had created her empire, and 
who had spread and upheld her dominion 
on the land and on the sea. 

At the top of Constitution Hill she 
would find the Iron Duke waiting for her 
on his bronze charger, and he might ask, 
" What is my part in this triumph ?" and 
he could answer, " I held back Napoleon." 
At this corner, where to-day there is the 
greatest crash of traffic and the most lav- 
ish display of wealth and fashion in the 
world, the toll-gates which separated the 
open country from London once stood, 
and not so long ago but that the Queen 

can remember it. From Hyde Park Cor- 

284 




THE QUEEN PASSING THE DEVONSHIRE CLUB IN ST. 

james's street 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

ner her route lay through Piccadilly, the 
street that took its name from a French 
ruff and gave it to a collar, and then down 
St. James's Street, past the windows of 
White's and Boodle's, where Fox, Pitt, 
Sheridan, and Brummel once looked out 
of these same windows. And so on to 
St. James's Palace, the hospital for lepers 
which Henry VIII. changed into a royal 
residence, and where to-day the Prince of 
Wales holds levees for statesmen and diplo- 
mats on the spot that once echoed to the 
cry of " Unclean ! unclean !" Then past 
Marlborough House, that took its name 
from the soldier Duke who built it, be- 
tween the " sweet shady " sides of Pall 
Mall, where Nell Gwynne leaned over her 
garden wall and held her celebrated con- 
versation with the King which so shocked 
Mr. Pepys. And then, waiting for the 
Queen at the foot of Regent Street, the 
bronze soldiers who commemorate the death 
of thousands of others who died for her in 

the ice and snows of the Crimea; and, a few 

285 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

rods beyond, Trafalgar Square, with Land- 
seer's crouching lions watching the four 
corners of the earth, and above them Nel- 
son, the one-armed sailor who died for the 
empire in the cockpit of the Victory, and 
who is now reared high above the beating 
heart of London on the cannon he wrested 
from the French war -ships in the Nile; 
and below him the statue to Gordon, who 
in his turn gave up his life for the Queen, 
and who stands now as immovable in 
bronze as he stood for so many months 
in life, when he looked out with weary eyes 
across the glaring desert, watching for the 
white helmets that came too late. From 
Trafalgar Square, where the blood of the 
regicides is marked by the statue of the 
monarch they murdered, the procession 
was directed into the Strand, past the 
church where Falstaff heard the bells ring 
at midnight, and so on to Temple Bar, 
where the Virgin Queen, many years be- 
fore, was met by the Lord Mayor of that 

day when she rode into the city to cele- 

286 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

brate the destruction of the Armada ; 
and then past the Temple and the Law 
Courts, the home of the Crusaders, and 
later of Johnson, Goldsmith, and Charles 
Lamb; past Fetter Lane and Fleet Street, 
where Pope and Addison and Steele walked 
and talked, and wrote lampoons on each 
other in the neighboring coffee-shops. 

And then, after the solemn halt at St. 
Paul's Cathedral, on into Cheapside, where 
the knights once rode to the tourneys, and 
where Whittinsjton heard the bells calling 
him back to London ; and across London 
Bridge, that used to hold the heads of the 
traitors; and so to the Surrey side, past 
the Church of St. Saviour, the resting-place 
of Fletcher and Massinger; and into the 
High Street, where stood the Tabard Inn 
of Chaucer ; and then past the Houses of 
Parliament; past the statue of Disraeli, 
who first taught her Majesty to spell the 
word Empire ; and the Abbey, the grave- 
yard of England's greatest dead; intoWhite- 

hall, where Charles was executed, where the 

2S7 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

horse-guards sit in their saddles in the 
narrow doorways ; and so back again to 
the palace. In those six miles the Queen 
would have passed over earth hallowed by 
memories of men so great that queens will 
be remembered because they reigned while 
these men lived — men whose memories will 
endure for so many years that a monarch's 
" longest reisrn" will seem but an hour in 
the vast extent of their immortality. 

When the sun pushed aside the mists at 
ten o'clock on the morning of the 2 2d of 
June, it saw the route of the procession 
like a double nought or a crooked eight, 
carved on the sooty surface of London. 
The rest of the city was busy with hurry- 
ing people, and soldiers marching at a 
quickstep, and galloping figures on horse- 
back, but this cleared space was swept and 
garnished and empty. Looking from above 
it was as though the people living on the 
streets that formed these loops had over- 
slept themselves and did not know that 

the world was astir. Looking from the 

288 




THE QUEEN DURING THE THANKSGIVING SERVICE AT 

st. Paul's 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

street, you saw that every house that faced 
this empty highway was decorated like a 
box in a theatre when royalty is expected 
to be present. It was like two continuous 
walls of boxes and grandstands facing each 
other for six miles ; and every seat was tak- 
en and there were people in the windows 
peering from far back over each other's 
shoulders, and people hanging to the roofs, 
and people packed on the sidewalks. These 
people cheered the sun when it appeared, 
and cheered belated cabs when the police 
turned them back, and Sarah Bernhardt 
when they allowed her to pass on. They 
were in a humor to cheer anything ; they 
even cheered the police. And when at 
eleven o'clock the cannon in Hyde Park 
boomed out the fact that the Queen had 
started towards them, they cheered the 
cannon, just as boys in the gallery applaud 
the orchestra when they appear — not be- 
cause they are lovers of music, but because 
the event of the night is at hand. 

As the Oueen was leaving Buckingham 

T 289 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

Palace she stopped and pressed an electric 
button, and a little black dot appeared on 
a piece of paper at the telegraph-office at 
St. Martin's-le-Grand. This was the signal 
that the message for which the cable peo- 
ple had been keeping the wires clear was 
to be sent on its way, and a sealed enve- 
lope that had been awaiting the signal was 
torn open, and they read these lines: " From 
my heart I thank my beloved people. May 
God bless them ! — Victoria, R. I." 

And in a few seconds five different 
cable companies were transmitting her 
Majesty's message to forty different points 
in her empire ; in a few minutes it had 
passed Suez and Aden on its way to Simla, 
Singapore, and Hong-kong, and in Central 
Africa a native runner set forth with it to 
Uganda ; while for those places which the 
cable does not reach, letters carried it to 
the islands of the world. The first answer 
was received from Ottawa. It arrived in 
sixteen minutes, and before the Queen had 

reached London Bridge other replies had 

290 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

come to her from the Cape, from the Gold 
Coast, and from Australia. 

The procession halted in three places — 
at the entrance to the City in the Strand, 
where Temple Bar once stood ; at St. 
Paul's Cathedral, where the religious cere- 
mony took place; and at the Mansion 
House. 

At the entrance to the City the Lord 
Mayor, in a long velvet cloak, presented 
her Majesty with the freedom of the City, 
and tendered her the great two - handed 
sword as a symbol of allegiance. The Queen 
returned it by touching it with her hand, 
and the Lord Mayor mounted a black 
horse, and managing the great sword and 
the great cloak with much delight to him- 
self and to the populace, galloped away. 
Lord Roberts, of Kabul and Kandahar, 
was the only other official who recognized 
the existence of the invisible barrier that 
guards the entrance to the City. As he 
reached it he drew up and saluted, and 

then rode on ; but all of the others, with 

291 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

the exception of the men of one company, 
rode or marched into the City without 
making any sign. The circumstance was 
only of interest because on ordinary occa- 
sions soldiers under arms may not march 
through the City without reversing their 
guns, and every night one can see the 
Household troops detailed for guard duty 
at the Bank of England tuck their guns 
under their arms when they pass the line 
of Temple Bar. The one exception on 
the day of the Jubilee was the men of the 
Royal Marine Artillery, who came to a 
halt and fixed bayonets, and then marched 
on again. This they did because their or- 
ganization is a relic of the old train-bands 
of the City, and so for many years has en- 
joyed the privilege of marching through 
it with fixed bayonets. It was essentially 
English and characteristic for one com- 
pany to halt in a jubilee procession in 
which was the Queen, with many of the 
most important people in Europe, simply 

that they might assert their ancient rights 

292 




M\ - 



, w 



LORD ROBERTS OF KABUL AND KANDAHAR ON HIS CELE- 
BRATED PONY 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

and privileges, even, as it were, at the point 
of the bayonet. 

The procession, when it came, was dis- 
tinctly a military spectacle, and as English 
people, especially the inhabitants of Lon- 
don, are used to soldiers, the presence of 
the Queen and the part played in it by 
the colonials was for them its chief inter- 
est. But without the Queen and the co- 
lonials, who were by far the most pictu- 
resque feature of the procession, there 
was enough to repay the visiting stran- 
ger for his journey, no matter from what 
distance he came. The procession was 
three-quarters of an hour in passing, and 
the test of its interest was that it seemed 
to have appeared and disappeared in ten 
minutes. There was a blurred vision of 
close ranks of great horses with silken 
sides, and above them rows of mirror-like 
breastplates and helmets, and quivering 
pennants, and bands of music with a drum- 
mer in advance of each throwing himself 
recklessly about in his saddle, and pound- 

293 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

ing alternately on two silver kettle-drums 
huncr with gold-embroidered cloths as rich 
as an archbishop's robe. There was artil- 
lery with harness of russet leather that 
shone like glass, and blue-jackets spread 
out like a fan and dragging brass guns 
behind them, and sheriffs in cloaks of fur 
with gold collars and chains, and Indian 
princes as straight and fine as an un- 
sheathed sword, in colored silk turbans of 
the East, and gilded chariots filled with 
poor relations from Germany, and three lit- 
tle princesses in white, who bowed so ener- 
getically that one of them fell in between 
the seats and had to be fished out again ; 
there were foreign princes from almost 
every country except Greece, and military 
attaches in as varied uniforms as there are 
costumes at a fancy ball ; and there was 
the commander-in-chief of the United 
States army riding with the representative 
of the French army, and Lieutenant Cald- 
well of our navy sitting a horse as calmly 
as though he had been educated at West 



294 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

Point, and the Hon. Whitelaw Reid in 
evening dress riding in the same carriage 
with the Spanish ambassador, and the pa- 
pal nuncio in the same carriage with the 
ambassador from China. 

And there were the colonials. The co- 
lonial premiers wore gold lace and white 
silk stockings, but their faces showed they 
were men who had fought their way to 
the top in new, unsettled countries, and 
who had had to deal with problems greater 
than the precedence of a >urt. And sur- 
rounding each of them were the picked 
men of his country who had helped in 
their humbler way to solve these problems 
— big, sunburned, broad-shouldered men 
in wide slouch hats, and with an alert, vig- 
ilant swagger that suggested long, lonely 
rides in the bush of Australia and across 
the veldt of South Africa and through the 
snows of Canada. There were also Dyaks 
from Borneo, with the scalps of their for- 
mer enemies neatly sewn to their scab- 
bards, even though they did follow in the 

295 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

wake of a Christian Queen ; and black ne- 
groes in zouave uniforms from Jamaica; 
and Hausas from the Gold Coast who had 
never marched on asphalt before, and who 
would have been much more at home slip- 
ping over fallen tree trunks and stealing 
through a swampy jungle. There were 
police from British Guiana, and Indians, 
and even Chinamen. Central America 
was the only one of the great divisions of 
the world that was not represented, and 
had there been a detachment from British 
Honduras, there would have been march- 
ing in that parade British subjects from 
North, Central, and South America, Eu- 
rope, Asia, Africa, and Australia, and from 
the islands that, starting at Trinidad, cir- 
cle the globe from the South Atlantic and 
Caribbean Sea, through the Mediterranean 
to the Indian Ocean, and down through 
the South Pacific, and back again past the 
Falkland Islands to Jamaica and Trinidad. 
The three millions of people who watch- 
ed the procession cheered every one in it, 

296 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

from Captain " Ossie " Ames, the tallest 
officer in the British army, who was not 
only born great, but who, much to his dis- 
tress, had greatness thrust upon him, and 
who rode in front, to the police who 
brought up the rear. 

But there were four persons in the pro- 
cession for whom the cheerino- was so 
much more enthusiastic than for any of 
the others that they rode apart by them- 
selves. These were the Queen, Lord Rob- 
erts, Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon. Maurice 
Gifford, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier. 

Lord Wolseley, the commander-in-chief, 
was not so well received as Lord Roberts, 
and suffered on account of his position, 
which was immediately in front of the 
Queen ; so no one had time to look at 
him nor to cheer him. The Prince of 
Wales was also too near the throne to re- 
ceive his accustomed share of attention, 
and some of the other favorites passed so 
quickly that the crowd failed to recognize 

them. But everybody seemed to know 

297 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

Lord Roberts and his white Arab pony 
that carried him during his ride of nine- 
teen days from Kabul to Kandahar, and 
no one in that procession knew better than 
that pony, with his six war medals hanging 
from his breast-band or strap, what a great 
day it was. The crowd saluted the hero 
of Kandahar as " Bobs," and cried " God 
bless you, Bobs !" and every now and then 
during a halt the general would ride up 
and speak to some soldier in the line 
who had served with him in India, and so 
make him happy. 

Lieutenant-Colonel Gifford was popular 
for two reasons — in the first place, he com- 
manded the Rhodesian Horse, and that 
body, as has been previously suggested, 
was the one associated in the minds of the 
English with the Chartered Company and 
the Matabele war and Dr. Jameson's raid, 
and the next raid which it seems now must 
inevitably follow. And besides the fact 
that he led this body of rough riders, he 

had lost an arm in the last Matabele war, 

298 










LT.-COL. THE HUN. MAURICE GIFFORD, COMMANDING THE 
RHODESIAN HORSE 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

and his sleeve was pinned across his chest, 
and he received his reward that day for 
losing it. His reception seemed to show 
what sympathy the man in the street had 
with the Parliamentary investigation of 
the Chartered Company's actions in South 
Africa. 

The enthusiasm over Sir Wilfrid Lau- 
rier was probably due to his position as 
premier of Canada, and to the picturesque 
fact that he is a Frenchman by descent, 
and that his face is so strong and fine that 
he was easily recognized by his portraits. 
Next to these four in the hearts of the 
crowd, on that day at least, were the Ind- 
ian princes, the Lord Mayor, Lord Charles 
Beresford, and all the colonial troops. 

The street that opens into the oval of 

St. Paul's Cathedral breaks in two just in 

front of the cathedral, and passes by on 

either side. In the open space that is 

formed by this parting of the highways is 

a statue of Queen Anne, which is shut off 

from the street by an iron railing. The 

299 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

Queen's carriage, with the eight cream- 
colored ponies, came up Ludgate Hill and 
turned to the left and then to the right, 
and stopped in front of the steps to the 
cathedral ; the foreign princes, on horse- 
back, grouped themselves in front of the 
statue, and the enamelled and gilded lan- 
daus of the special ambassadors and of 
the princesses formed en echelon along the 
roadway to the right. Beyond these were 
circles of the Household troops in red 
coats and bear- skins, and contingents of 
soldiers from the far East, from India, 
Africa, and China. 

Rising from the lowest step of the ca- 
thedral was a great tribune separated into 
three parts, and back of this, red-covered 
balconies hung between the great black 
pillars like birds' nests in the branches of 
a tree. Below them the vast tribune shone 
with colored silk and gold cloth, and ra- 
diated with jewels like a vast bank of beau- 
tiful flowers. Among these flowers were 

Indian princes in coats sewn with dia- 

300 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

monds that hid them in flashes of light, 
archbishops and bishops in robes of gold 
that suggested those of the Church of 
Rome, ambassadors in stars and sashes, 
with their official families in gold braid 
and decorations. In the centre was a great 
mass of smiling-faced choir-boys, like cher- 
ubs in night-gowns, and two hundred mu- 
sicians picked from bands of many regi- 
ments and wearing many uniforms. On 
the lowest steps were dignitaries of the 
Church in the pink and crimson capes the 
different universities had bestowed upon 
them, and the Bishop of Finland, the rep- 
resentative of Russia, and the Bishop of 
New York, and, what was perhaps the most 
striking example of the all-embracing nat- 
ure of the celebration, a captain from the 
Salvation Army with his red ribbon around 
his cap. There were judges in wigs and 
black silk gowns, and Chinamen in robes 
of colored silk, and Turkish envoys in 
fezes, and Persian envoys in Astrakhan 

caps. There were individuals in this group 

301 
•t 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

who on most occasions take the centre of 
the stage at any gathering and hold it for 
hours, but on this great day they were 
only spectators, and had not as much to 
do in the celebration as had one of the 
soldiers that lined the street. 

Lord Salisbury, Mr. Balfour, Joseph 
Chamberlain, and Sir William Harcourt 
were among these, and there was also 
our ambassador, the Hon. John Hay, and 
the secretaries of his embassy, which, as 
a whole, is perhaps the best embassy our 
country or any other country has sent to 
the Court of St. James. And there were 
rows of Beef-eaters in the costume of the 
Tudors, and Bluecoat Boys in the costume 
of Edward VI. 

The ceremony that followed upon the 
arrival of the Queen was a very simple 
one, but it was the most impressive one 
that could have been selected for that 
moment in the history of the Empire. It 
consisted of the Te Deum, the National 

Anthem, and the Doxology. That is a 

302 




MAHARAJAH SIR PETRAP SINGH 



THE QUEEN'S JUBILEE 

difficult selection to surpass at any time, 
and especially when the three are sung 
from the hearts of ten thousand people. 

The Te Deum was given to music writ- 
ten for the occasion, and the National 
Anthem, had it not been already written, 
would have been inspired by that occasion, 
and the Doxology was probably sung as it 
was never sung before. When the Jaenes- 
ville miners were rescued alive from the 
pit after they had been entombed there 
and given up for dead for eighteen days, 
their rescuers and all the mining popula- 
tion of Jaenesville marched to the house 
of the owner of the mines at two o'clock 
in the morning, and, standing in the snow, 
sang the Doxology, and a man who was 
there told me he hid himself in the house 
and cried. If he had been at St. Paul's 
Cathedral he would have had to hide him- 
self again, for there were ten thousand 
people singing, " Praise God from Whom 
all blessings flow," as loudly as they could, 
and with tears running down their faces. 

303 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

There were princesses standing up in their 
carnages, and black men from the Gold 
Coast, Maharajahs from India, and red- 
coated Tommys, and young men who will 
inherit kingdoms and empires, and arch- 
bishops, and cynical old diplomats, and 
soldiers and sailors from the " land of the 
palm and the pine " and from the seven 
seas, and women and men who were just 
subjects of the Queen and who were con- 
tent with that. There was probably never 
before such a moment, in which so many 
races of people, of so many castes, and of 
such different values to this world, sang 
praises to God at one time, and in one 
place, and with one heart. And when it 
was all over, and the cannon at the Tower 
were booming across the water-front, the 
Archbishop of Canterbury, of all the people 
in the world, waved his arm and shouted, 
" Three cheers for the Queen !" and the 
soldiers stuck their bear -skins on their 
bayonets and swung them above their 
heads and cheered, and the women on the 

304 



THE QUEEN S JUBILEE 

house-tops and balconies waved their hand- 
kerchiefs and cheered, and the men beat 
the air with their hats and cheered, and the 
Lady in the Black Dress nodded and bowed 
her head at them, and winked away the 
tears in her eyes. 



THE END 



